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EMOTIONAL POLITICAL ECOLOGIES

The role of emotions in the politics of environmental conflicts:

two case studies in Chile and Mexico

Ph. D Dissertation Marien González Hidalgo

Doctoral Programme in Environmental Science and Technology

Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Amientals (ICTA)Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)

Barcelona, 11 July 2017

DirectorDr. Christos Zografos

Johns Hopkins University - Pompeu Fabra University Public Policy Centre, Barcelona, SpainDepartment of Political and Social Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

Co-DirectorDra. Beatriz Bustos Gallardo

Geography Department, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidad de Chile

TutorProf. Dr. Giorgos Kallis

Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona and Institució Catalana de Recerca I Estudis Avançats (ICREA)

EMOTIONAL POLITICAL ECOLOGIESThe role of emotions in the politics of environmental conflicts:

two case studies in Chile and Mexico

Cover: Ana Varela

Design: Paulina Veloso

The access to the content of this thesis is limited to the acceptance

of the use conditions set by the following Creative commons license.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en

To my two grandfathers and two grandmothers, who inspire me with their tenacity in working for the land

and in caring for othersand their curiosity and pleasure for research.

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ABSTRACT

This thesis explores the usually unseen and undervalued political work that emotions do in environmental conflicts. As several feminist and affect political ecologists and geographers have begun to discuss, analysing the role of emotions in environmental conflicts can enable a better understanding of how social and economic orders develop, how political subjectivities are built and how and why social mobilisations take place. However, we still need to better understand, both conceptually and empirically, the relations between emotion, power and environmental conflict. This thesis first delineates a theoretical framework for the consideration of emotion in political ecology, what I name Emotional Political Ecologies (EmPEs), reviewing work in the field of feminist political ecology, emotional geographies, social and cultural anthropology, social psychology and social movements. This critical literature review indicates that EmPEs need to employ a multi-dimensional framework that captures the psychological, more-than-human, geographical, social and political dimensions that intersect subjectivities in environmental conflicts. My review also defines the research gaps addressed in this thesis: the need to engage with “negative emotions” – such as anger or trauma – present in environmental conflicts, as well as to further explore the political ecologies of “healing”.

The empirical chapters of this thesis are organised under a shared research strategy, adapting established political ecology research strategies – case study method with an emphasis on ethnographic methods – in order to grasp “the emotional”. In the first empirical case of this thesis, I analyse the historical and contemporary development of forestry extractivism in southern Chile, specifically in and around indigenous Mapuche territories. My analysis shows that commercial forestry advances by securing the control of land through disciplinary interventions, which aim to govern subjectivities and create subjects that can help secure capital accumulation and extractivism. Nevertheless, individuals and communities obstruct this project by mobilising sovereignty claims that permit them to exercise control over their own subject-making. My analysis highlights the emotional dimension of this process of political subjectivation, especially via the collective expression of “negative” emotions such as anger and sorrow, which I found to be crucial resources that help Mapuche communities maintain resistance. In the second empirical chapter of this thesis, I explore the ways in which psychotherapeutic practice sheds light on indigenous and peasant subjectivation processes through analysing the Gestalt Therapy workshops organised by a local NGO in southern Chiapas, Mexico. Empirical evidence serves as the basis from which to discuss the role of psychotherapeutic practice in facilitating individual and collective reflexivity, and in fostering political fellowship and participation in community matters. My analysis also establishes that “healing interventions” need to explicitly engage with structural issues of power in order to move beyond de-contextualised, and thus depoliticised, reflexivity.

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My research enables a discussion of the political work of emotions in environmental conflicts, highlighting three simultaneous, contradictory and creative ways in which emotions interplay in environmental conflicts: emotional environmentality, emotional oppression and emotional environmentalism. This interplay highlights an ambivalence, that is to say a constantly unresolved tension between the role of emotions as a channel for the subversion of hegemonic power and, conversely, their role in reproducing hegemonic power dynamics. I argue that considering “the emotional” as a space of power and conflict offers opportunities for socio-environmental movements to open new spaces for re-articulating power relationships inside and outside movements, as well as for political ecologists to further consider the private and public, the individual and collective spheres of environmental conflicts and the unstable standpoints of the different social actors participating in conflicts. Further exploring the field of EmPEs can inform political ecological analysis aimed at unpacking and transforming the subtle power relationships and challenges that environmental conflicts involve.

KEYWORDS: Political ecology, emotions, conflict, subjectivity, emotional geography, affect, social movements, psychology, discipline, psychotherapy, Mapuche, Chiapas.

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ECOLOGÍAS POLÍTICAS EMOCIONALES.El papel de las emociones en la política de los conflictos ambientales:

dos casos de estudio en Chile y México

RESUMEN

Esta tesis explora el papel, usualmente ignorado o subestimado, que las emociones desempeñan en los conflictos ambientales. Como varios estudios han mostrado recientemente, considerar las emociones en el análisis de los conflictos ambientales facilita la comprensión de cómo se estructura el orden socioeconómico, cómo se construyen las subjetividades políticas y cómo se producen las movilizaciones sociales. Sin embargo, todavía necesitamos comprender mejor, conceptual y empíricamente, las relaciones entre emoción, poder y conflicto ambiental. Esta tesis define inicialmente un marco teórico para la consideración de “lo emocional” en ecología política (lo que llamo Ecologías Políticas Emocionales, EPEms), revisando bibliografía en ecología política feminista, geografías emocionales, antropología social y cultural, psicología social y sobre movimientos sociales. Mi revisión señala que las EPEms necesitan emplear un marco multidimensional que capture las dimensiones psicológica, “más-que-humana”, geográfica, social y política que se entrecruzan en las subjetividades en los conflictos ambientales. Mi revisión también define los vacíos en la literatura identificados en esta tesis: la necesidad de considerar las “emociones negativas” como la rabia o el trauma presentes en los conflictos ambientales, así como explorar las posibilidades de “sanación”.

Los capítulos empíricos de esta tesis se desarrollan mediante una metodología de investigación común, adaptando estrategias habituales de investigación en ecología política – estudio de caso con énfasis en métodos etnográficos – para captar “lo emocional”. En el primer caso empírico, analizo el desarrollo histórico y contemporáneo del extractivismo forestal en el sur de Chile, en territorios índígenas Mapuche. Mi análisis muestra que la industria forestal avanza asegurando el control del territorio mediante intervenciones disciplinarias, con el objetivo de gobernar subjetividades para que los sujetos colaboren en el proyecto extractivista. Sin embargo, individuos y comunidades interfieren en este proyecto: sus reivindicaciones de soberanía les permiten ejercer control sobre su propio proceso de subjetivación. En este proceso, destaco el papel de la expresión colectiva de emociones “negativas” como la rabia y el dolor, que considero recursos cruciales que ayudan a las comunidades Mapuche a mantener la resistencia. En el segundo caso empírico exploro las formas en que la práctica psicoterapéutica permite entender mejor los procesos de subjetivación indígena y campesina en conflicto, analizando talleres basados en Terapia Gestalt organizados por una ONG en el sur de Chiapas, México. La evidencia empírica sirve para discutir el papel de las intervenciones terapéuticas a la hora de facilitar la reflexividad individual-colectiva y la participación en asuntos comunitarios. Mi análisis también establece que las “intervenciones sanadoras” necesitan abordar explícitamente cuestiones estructurales de poder para ir más allá de una reflexividad des-contextualizada y des-politizada.

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Mi investigación permite discutir el trabajo político de las emociones en los conflictos ambientales, destacando tres formas simultáneas y contrapuestas en que las emociones interactúan en los conflictos ambientales: gubernamentalidad emocional, opresión emocional y movilización emocional. Esta interacción muestra una ambivalencia, es decir una tensión constante entre el papel de las emociones como canales para la subversión del poder hegemónico y su papel en la reproducción del mismo. Sostengo que considerar “lo emocional” como un espacio de poder y conflicto ofrece oportunidades a los movimientos socio-ambientales para abrir espacios de re-articulación de las relaciones de poder dentro y fuera de los movimientos, así como a la investigación en ecología política, expandiendo el análisis del desarrollo de los conflictos en las esferas privadas/públicas, individuales/colectivas y considerando posiciones inestables y contradictorias en los puntos de vista de diferentes actores sociales. La investigación en el marco de las EPEms que desarrolla esta tesis puede servir de base para futuras investigaciones interesadas en revelar y transformar las sutilezas de las relaciones de poder y los desafíos que implican los conflictos ambientales.

Palabras clave: Ecología política, emociones, conflicto ambiental, subjetividad, geografía emocional, afecto, movimientos sociales, psicología, disciplina, psicoterapia, Mapuche, Chiapas.

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ECOLOGIES POLÍTIQUES EMOCIONALS.El paper de les emocions en la política dels conflictes ambientals:

dos casos d’estudi a Xile i Mèxic

RESUM

Aquesta tesi explora el paper, normalment ignorat o subestimat, que les emocions juguen en els conflictes ambientals. Com diversos estudis han demostrat recentment, considerar les emocions en l’anàlisi dels conflictes ambientals facilita la comprensió de com s’estructura l’ordre socioeconòmic, com es construeixen les subjectivitats polítiques i com es produeixen les mobilitzacions socials. No obstant això, encara hem d’entendre millor, conceptual i empíricament, les relacions entre emoció, poder i conflicte ambiental. Aquesta tesi defineix inicialment un marc teòric per a la consideració “d’allò emocional” en ecologia política (el que jo anomeno Ecologies Polítiques Emocionals, EPEms), revisant bibliografia sobre ecologia política feminista, geografies emocionals, antropologia social i cultural, psicologia social i sobre moviments socials. La meva revisió apunta que les EPEms necessiten emprar un marc multidimensional que capturi les dimensions psicològica, “més-que-humana”, geogràfica, social i política que s’entrecreuen en les subjectivitats en els conflictes ambientals. La meva revisió també defineix els buits en la literatura identificats en aquesta tesi: la necessitat de considerar les “emocions negatives” com la ràbia o el trauma presents en els conflictes ambientals, així com explorar les possibilitats de “sanació”.

Els capítols empírics d’aquesta tesi es desenvolupen mitjançant una metodologia d’investigació comuna, adaptant l’estratègia habitual de recerca en ecologia política – estudi de cas amb èmfasi en mètodes etnogràfics – per captar “allò emocional”. En el primer cas empíric, analitzo el desenvolupament històric i contemporani del extractivisme forestal al sud de Xile en territoris indígenes Maputxe. El meu estudi mostra que la indústria forestal avança assegurant el control del territori mitjançant intervencions disciplinàries, amb l’objectiu de governar subjectivitats perquè els subjectes puguin col·laborar en el projecte extractivista. No obstant això, les reivindicacions de sobirania d’individus i comunitats interfereixen en aquest projecte, permetent exercir control sobre el seu propi procés de subjectivació. En aquest procés, destaca el paper de l’expressió col·lectiva d’emocions “negatives” com la ràbia i el dolor, que considero recursos clau que ajuden a les comunitats Maputxe a mantenir la resistència. En el segon cas empíric exploro les formes en què la pràctica psicoterapèutica permet entendre millor els processos de subjectivació indígena i camperola en conflicte, analitzant el tallers basats en Teràpia Gestalt organitzats per una ONG al sud de Chiapas, Mèxic. L’evidència empírica serveix per discutir les possibilitats que ofereixen les intervencions terapèutiques a la facilitació de la reflexivitat individual-col·lectiva i la participació en assumptes comunitaris. La meva anàlisi també estableix que les intervencions “sanadores” necessiten abordar explícitament qüestions estructurals de poder, per anar més enllà d’una reflexivitat des-contextualitzada i des-polititzada.

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La meva recerca permet discutir el treball polític de les emocions en els conflictes ambientals, destacant tres formes simultànies i contraposades en què les emocions interactuen en els conflictes ambientals: governamentalitat emocional, opressió emocional i mobilització emocional. Aquesta interacció mostra una ambivalència, és a dir, una tensió constant entre el paper de les emocions com a canals per a la subversió del poder hegemònic i el seu paper en la reproducció d’aquest. Afirmo que considerar “allò emocional” com un espai de poder i conflicte ofereix oportunitats als moviments socioambientals per establir espais de re-articulació de les relacions de poder dins i fora dels moviments. També representa una oportunitat per a la investigació en ecologia política, expandint l’anàlisi del desenvolupament dels conflictes en les esferes privades/públiques, individuals/col·lectives i considerant posicions inestables i contradictòries en els punts de vista de diferents actors socials. La investigació en el marc de les EPEms que desenvolupa aquesta tesi pot servir de base per a futures investigacions interessades en revelar i transformar les subtileses de les relacions de poder i els desafiaments que impliquen els conflictes ambientals.

Paraules clau: Ecologia política, emocions, conflicte ambiental, subjectivitat, geografia emocional, afecte, moviments socials, psicologia, disciplina, psicoteràpia, Maputxe, Chiapas.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS- AGRADECIMIENTOS While working on this thesis, I found myself mapping out a chaotic, connected, open and in many cases contradictory set of connections that, in a striking way, linked Tirúa with Stockholm, Comitán de Dominguez with Barcelona, Santiago de Chile with Manchester... This has been feasible thanks to a generous scholarship under Marie Curie Actions, Initial Training Networks, FP7–PEOPLE–2011; contract No 289374- ENTITLE (European Network of Political Ecology). While the writing of this thesis demanded high quantities of stubbornness and courage, if I have been able to elaborate upon the issues addressed within these pages it is, above all, thanks to those individuals who have trusted and supported me, and shared with me a part of their lives during these years.

I especially thank those who, in my walking around the “open veins of Latin America”, allowed me to witness and be a part of their lives, words and emotional geographies; the writing of this thesis represents my solidarity with them. I could not have written a single word if it were not for all the people who participated in some way in my research; people from the communities, social organisations, institutions, non-governmental organizations and universities, offering their time, their opinions, contacts, knowledge and experiences. Though I did my best to give back what I learnt, I will nonetheless forever be in their debt. This path would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my thesis supervisor, Christos Zografos. His close and sensitive style, patience, generosity and desire to draw “my voice” out have made me feel clearly that although this was my own journey, I was not alone. Gracias de cabeza y de corazón. I am also grateful to my co-supervisor, Beatriz Bustos, and to my “supervisor in the shadows”, or “manager of complicated things”, Maria Christina Fragkou, for reading, commenting, listening and helping me immensely in my three years in the Department of Geography of the Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Chile. I am grateful also to Giorgos Kallis, who, since my master’s degree in 2009, bestowed his trust and gave me the chance to continue this path of academic research. I am also grateful to Stefania Barca, Katherine Farrell and Maria Kaika who at the very beginning of this process and later on allowed me to advance, grow and think for myself. I hope I can continue to collaborate in the future with all of you.

All of them are part of ENTITLE, which, as a “reference point in the map”, transformed a group of people/researchers into a sort of academic family who I knew I would meet every three months somewhere in the world – with all the rituals, dreams and tasks, roles and stories each family has. Knowing they were there even when walking alone between tree plantations was a great comfort. Thanks to my colleagues, the fellows, for all that I have learned from and with them about the intellectual and political motivations that led us to this shared path. I especially thank the Barcelona group, Irmak, Panagiota, Melissa, Rita, Diego and Santiago, for their academic and

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personal support, sharing siestas en la biblioteca and the laughs that followed. I am especially grateful to Melissa for her improvements to the English of the empirical chapters, to Irina for encouraging me to read post-structuralism and to Irmak and Santi for laughing together at this academic world, and above all at ourselves. Thanks also to Mathew, who, who as a friend of this extended family helped me apply a clarity towards parts of this thesis.

En Chile, agradezco a los equipos del Observatorio Latinoamericano de Conflictos Ambientales (en Santiago), Ingenieros Forestales por el Bosque Nativo (Valdivia), Colectivo Resumen (Concepción), Mapuexpress (Santiago y Temuco), Observatorio Ciudadano (Temuco) y el Centro de Ética y Reflexión Social Fernando Vives SJ (UAH) por facilitarme mi trabajo- o la difusión del mismo- en los territorios en los que estuve. Agradezco especialmente a Conchu por ser cómplice en los juegos de palabras y en la tarea de “ponerle color” en la forma de vincularnos con los conflictos ambientales. También agradezco a Sandra (Universidad de la Frontera) por ser un apoyo intelectual, activista y un hogar en Temuco. Chaltu mai, una y mil veces, a las comunidades Mapuche en resistencia en la provincia de Arauco, especialmente a las familias de Pablo H., Pablo Q. y Juan R., por enseñarme el significado y la acción desde el kimun, piwke y newen. Marichiweu! Gracias también a mis compañeros de casa y familia en Santiago, Gabi, Pablo y Silvia, por acompañarnos en el día a día a levantarnos rebeldes sobre nuestras lomas, y a Paulina, que con su paleta de colores ayuda a cerrar esta tesis con el cariño de los detalles.

En Chiapas (México), agradezco al equipo de Edupaz por dejarme conocer su trabajo y su día a día en la región. Agradezco a todas las personas que dieron su tiempo para hablar conmigo, de manera entregada y dejándome ser participes de su voluntad de servicio al bien común. Agradezco especialmente a Fredy, por acompañarme en parte de este viaje con altas dosis de paciencia y dulzura (como las abejas). Compartir ratitos de Vida con él y con su familia es uno de los regalos y aprendizajes más valiosos que me ha dado este viaje.

Agradezco también a los diferentes grupos y equipos fuera de la universidad con los que he crecido en estos años. Gracias a mis compañeros y compañeras de la formación en Gestalt, de los SAT en Punta de Tralca (Chile) y en Barcelona, de los talleres de Trabajo de Procesos y del Teatro del Oprimido en Pa’ tothom. Con todos ellos he elaborado, aún sin ser consciente del todo, algunas de las ideas que están en esta tesis. Agradezco especialmente a Gerardo O. por apuntarme el camino hacia Chiapas una tarde de Octubre de 2013 en la costa del pacífico chileno, y a Lola y a Cami por ser compañeras del viaje y buscar la “gestalt revolucionaria!”. Gracias también a Laura y a Meritxell por apoyarme en momentos de esta tesis desde la Gestalt y el Trabajo de Procesos.

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Mientras yo daba todas estas vueltas, muchas personas, aparentemente se han quedado “donde siempre” dándome apoyo en la distancia, aunque varias me han acompañado físicamente (gràcies Pere por el primer viaje a terreno en Chile; gracias Christos por aprender a hacer sopaipillas entre plantaciones forestales; gracias Martusia por ser la mejor reportera-conductora-compañera de cabaña en los recorridos por el Wallmapu, y gracias mamá, por viajar conmigo al “otro” Sur de Chile). Mis “familias escogidas” en Barcelona y Madrid marcaban mi km 0 donde aterrizar “en casa”. En Barcelona, gracias a Marina, Marta, Vero, María, Isa, Sascha, Ana, Arnim, Gael, Elena, Aleix, Christian, Anna, Helena, Sara, Pau, Helena y Marcos por ser, simplemente, la mejor red de apoyo y neorealvisceralismo en Barcelona. Agradezco especialmente a Marina, Vero, Irmak y Anna las manos tendidas en esta última etapa, y a Ana por poner su creatividad, cariño y cuidado en la portada de esta tesis. Gracias también a lxs compas del ICTA, especialmente a Daniela, Paola y Geovanna por compartir sueños y proyectos; a Marta B. por la ayuda amable a elaborar los mapas y a Cristina D. y al equipo de administración por hacer las cosas más fáciles en cerrar esta tesis. Gracias también a mis profes de Ashtanga, Fito y Ángel, por ayudarme a sostener todo esto con las dosis justas de fuerza y flexibilidad; y a Jonas y al hort de l’eriçó por los buenos alimentos. En Madrid, gracias Crispi, Andriu, Anita, Clari, Inosuke, Martus y Palomi y todas las leidis por acompañarnos en el espíritu intrépido en nuestros viajes; gracias a todos los nabxs por la voluntad de celebrar la amistad año tras año; y gracias a Claudia, Bea, Krml, Gem y Tuska por seguir tejiendo amistad desde años inmemoriables, especialmente a Tuska por ayudarme a aterrizar mis ideas y a Claudia por ver con ilusión mi trabajo. Gracias también a Rodri, por ser confidente de las esperanzas, desesperanzas y desesperaciones que han acompañado este proceso. Y, aunque al otro lado del atlántico, gracias Margarita por haber deambulado conmigo por Colombia durante uno de los momentos más difíciles de estos años.

Finalmente, agradezco a tres personas que me han acompañado en muchos de los escenarios que comparto aquí. A mi amiga Cris, que desde la huerta y la vida plena i buida, me ha dado la mano en las diferentes etapas, subidas y bajadas de este proceso y dejándome acompañarla también, aún en la distancia, en las suyas. Y, gracias a mi familia, especialmente a mi madre y a mi padre; sin su confianza, apoyo, cuidados y “dejarme hacer” nada de todo lo que he aprendido en este viaje hubiera sido posible.

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PREFACE

I can now see how this thesis partially answers some of the unresolved questions I have left to one side during different personal experiences and reflexions while researching, working or engaging with activists and civil society collectives. I remember a conversation with a colleague from Amigos de la Tierra (Friends of the Earth) while driving back from visiting individuals in Northern Madrid that were learning how to compost and reduce their waste generation. We two discussed the limitations of our task to transform their habits, given the cultural, emotional and symbolic engagements with both “valuable” and “throw-away” resources they and we had culturally grown up with, and which at some points revealed contradictions in the way both they and we sought to transform the current (ab)use of natural resources. I also remember researching the political aftermath of a forest fire in southern Catalonia during my master’s thesis, and how I perceived a sort of universal feeling of sadness when looking at the burnt landscape, a fact that contrasted strikingly with academic discussions on the historical presence of fire in the Mediterranean. Also, while I was first thinking of doing a PhD, I participated in several assemblies organised by the Feministes indignadas (indignant feminists, 15-M movement in Barcelona), the critical feminist economists Dones i treballs, also in Barcelona, and very occasionally the Ecofeminist group affiliated to Ecologistas en Acción in Madrid. These spaces were rich sources of inspiration not only for the politically relevant topics we were discussing – identity and body politics, gender and sexual rights, care economies, and the like – but also for the way we were discussing and deciding what counted as the politics of activism: mutually listening to “the personal as political”, allowing the expression of emotions and creatively using spaces and our bodies for protest. All these experiences taught me that there was something more than the “purely evident and visible” in the politics of environmental challenges, although I still did not know that it was “the emotional” that had been calling my attention.

Discovering my research interest in “the emotional” has been a key part of this PhD journey, and, as I will explain in the main the body of the thesis, was inspired by grounded in-the-field experiences in southern Chile. When I moved to southern Chile in January 2013 I had to defer my training as a Gestalt Therapist at the Institut Gestalt in Barcelona. Later that same year, in my first contact with Mapuche communities, I perceived a commonality – despite the huge, seemingly insurmountable differences – in the way indigenous communities came together to defend their lands and how “first world” individuals came together in search of emotional healing, with common practices, rituals, inter-subjective communication and the expression of “negative” emotions. In that sense, this thesis also serves to cover the unresolved tension between different interests of mine that I thought I had to keep separate, for instance, politics and the environment, and how they both relate to emotions, feelings and the psyche.

While my background and my experience in the field inspired me towards the emotional, my participation in the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) project served not

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only to fund three years of my research and numerous trips to specialised intensive courses, conferences and summer schools, but also to train me in the theoretical, methodological and scriptorial requirements for academic research in political ecology. ENTITLE also facilitated a multitude of debates and discussions that helped me elaborate my thoughts and gave rise to important collaborations, the most important of which being a collaborative article (in progress) co-authored with Julie de Los Reyes, Irmak Ertör, Daniel Banoub and Gavin Bridge that aims to produce a comparative analysis of commodity booms in different sectors; an essay contribution for the book Political Ecology for Civil Society (2015), a collectively-edited collection of multi-authored chapters introducing and developing key political ecology concepts and debates, where I contributed to the chapter on environmental conflicts; and my participation as an editor and contributor to ENTITLEblog (https://entitleblog.org).

Through this PhD journey I have published two articles, in the journals Geoforum (co-authored with Christos Zografos) and Emotion, Space and Society, and submitted a third (also co-authored with Christos Zografos), currently under review, to Progress of Human Geography; this thesis collects these three papers, reworked into chapters. I also published a paper together with Iago Otero and Giorgos Kallis in Environmental and Planning A (2014), based on my work completed during my master’s thesis on the political ecology of forest fires in Catalonia. While this research provided the foundations for the work I later developed in Chile, it has not been included here for reasons of coherence.

Finally, as part of my collaborations and fieldwork, I wrote a report on the impact of tree plantations for water availability in my research area of Chile. This report, together with several articles (alone and co-authored) and activities, aimed to share my research results (mainly in Chile) as well as to intervene in public debates (see Annex 4). Also, in 2016 I co-edited with Gustavo García and Mariana Walter volume 51 of the Journal Ecologia Politica with a special issue on Latin America. These publications sought to generate conversations, debates and spaces of knowledge, from the vantage point of political ecology, in order to better understand and seek to transform power asymmetries in the politics of environmental conflicts in Latin America; an intention I hope I can uphold in the future.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION 1. General Introduction 32. Aims and Summary of the Main Argument 63. Research Gaps 74. Research Questions and Structure of the Thesis 8

II. THE “EMOTIONAL TURN” IN POLITICAL ECOLOGY: MAPPING EMOTIONAL POLITICAL ECOLOGIES FOR THE STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICTS

1. Introduction 132. Emotions, Subjectivities and Conflicts: Mapping Diverse Understandings 15 2.1 Feminist Political Ecologies: from Acknowledging Emotions and Gender Identities

to Performative Subjectivities 15 2.2 Emotional Geographies: Emotions as Engagements with Places and Environments 18 2.3 Social and Cultural Anthropology Studies of Relational, Affective Subjectivities: the More-Than-Human 20 2.4 Social Psychology: Emotional Impacts of Environmental Change and Conflicts 22 2.5 Social Movements Theory: Emotions as Triggers for Eco-Political Action 233. Looking for Common Grounds: Relational Emotions and Multidimensional EmPEs 254. Discussing the Political in EmPEs 285. Conclusions: Contributions and Proposals for Future Research Agendas 30

III. METHODOLOGY

1. Introduction 352. Case Study Strategy and Site Selection 35 2. 1 Site Selection 373. Methods 394. Epistemology, Positionality and Ethics 46

IV. HOW SOVEREIGNTY CLAIMS AND “NEGATIVE” EMOTIONS INFLUENCE THE PROCESS OF SUBJECT-MAKING: EVIDENCE FROM A CASE OF CONFLICT OVER TREE PLANTATIONS IN SOUTHERN CHILE

1. Introduction 512. Into the Woods: Land Control, Conflict and Subjectivities 523. Methods 54 3.1 Overview of the Conflict 564. Histories of Dispossession: State-building, Capital Accumulation and Forestry in Arauco 585. Accumulating through Disciplining: the Case of Fire Control 616. Local Reactions and Struggles for Sovereignty: Attempts to Affect Land Control 647. Ritual, Emotions and Politic 668. Conclusions: Sovereignty, Political Subjectivation and Emotions in Environmental Conflicts 70

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V. THE POLITICS OF REFLEXIVITY: SUBJECTIVITIES, ACTIVISM, ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT AND GESTALT THERAPY IN SOUTHERN CHIAPAS

1. Environmental Conflict and Subjectivities: What Role for Psychotherapeutic Practice? 772. The Psychotherapeutic Gap in Political Ecology: Politics, Subjectivities and Healing 793. Edupaz’s Gestalt Therapy Workshops and the Context of their Emergence 81 3.1 Methods 81 3.2 Emotional Support in Peasant-indigenous Chiapas: Liberation Ecologies and Edupaz 834. Re-building Individual, Relational and Participatory Selves/subjects 855. Limits to Action: Situating the Self but Disconnecting from Context? 876. Exploring Activists’ Subjectivities via Gestalt Therapy: Generative Spaces of Contestation or Therapy as Personal Politics? 907. Conclusions 92

VI. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

1. Introduction 952. Three Roles for Emotions in Environmental Conflicts: Emotional Environmentality, Emotional Oppression and Emotional Environmentalism 95 2.1 Emotional Environmentality 96 2.2 Emotional Oppression 97 2.3 Emotional Environmentalism 993. The Ambivalent Political Work of Emotions: Opportunities for Movements and Political Ecology Research Agendas 1014. Limitations and Future Research 107 4.1 On the Nature of Emotions 107 4.2 On the Scales of the Political 108 4.3 Structural Issues: Gender, Class, Ethnicity 108 4.4 Concrete Contributions of my Research to Local Movements 1095. General Conclusions 110

REFERENCES 115 ANNEX 1. Actors Interviewed and Semi-structured Interviews in Chile 133ANNEX 2. Semi-structured Interviews and Focus Groups in Mexico 135ANNEX 3. Emotions as Part of the Research Process. Reflections over my “Emotional Fieldwork Diary” (February 2014) 138ANNEX 4. Non-peer Reviewed Articles, Reports and Dissemination Activities related to Case Studies (mainly in Chile) 141

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure II.1 Bodies of literature that feed my review of EmPEs 18Figure II.2 Bodies of literature reviewed and their emphasis in different dimensions for the study of emotions in environmental conflicts 27Figure II. 3 Conceptual framework for EmPEs which considers several dimensions and ambivalent roles of emotions as regards power dynamics 29Figure III.1 Empirical chapters consider the different dimensions for the study of emotions in environmental conflicts 39Figure III.2 Interaction of the different research methods used in my research strategy 40Figure III.3 Research analytical approach based on the research wheel metaphor 45Figure IV.1 Situation map of fieldwork in southern Chile. Own elaboration with cartographic data from GADM and CONAF. GRS WGS84, Datum WGS84. Main map: own elaboration with cartographic data of BCN, CGIAR-CSI, Digital Chart of the World, CONAF and GADM repositories. SRS: UTM 19S, Datum WGS84. Elaborated by M. Borròs, with support of P. Pliscoff 55Figure IV.2 CONAF and CORMA (association of plantation owners, with high participation of the main companies) propaganda material. The text reads: “Help us! It depends on you to prevent forest fires”. Source: CORMA 63Figure IV.3 Members of a Mapuche trawun (parliament) in Arauco visit the areas in dispute. Source: Mapuche community organising the gathering. Distributed with permission 67Figure VI.1 Three main roles for emotions in environmental conflicts in the two case studies presented 96Figure VI.2 Ambivalent roles for emotions in environmental conflicts and opportunities for activism and research 102Figure1 Annex 3 Emotional map of my fieldwork. The size of the coloured area implies approximate frequency of different emotions during 6 weeks of fieldwork. Blue refers to fear, purple to sadness, yellow to joy, and red to anger 139

LIST OF TABLES

Table III.1 Research strategy and corresponding methods addressing research questions 36Table III.2 Research strategy and methods developed for each case study 40 Table IV.1 National economic information for the forestry sector in 2013. Own elaboration. Source: Servicio de Impuestos Internos, Chile 61Table V.1 Main data collection strategies used during fieldwork in southern Chiapas (Mexico) 82Table VI.1 Different processes facilitate emotional expression in my two empirical studies 103Table VI.2 Overview of how my different methods let me capture the different spheres where emotions materialise in contexts of environmental conflicts 105

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1. INTRODUCTION

No conozco casi nada que sea de sentido común. Cada cosa que se dice que es de sentido común ha sido producto

de esfuerzos y luchas de alguna gente por ella.

I know almost nothing that is common sense.Every thing that is said to be common sense has been the product

of efforts and struggles of some people for it.

Amelia Varcárcel

I. Introduction

2

Emotional Political Ecologies

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1. General Introduction

Time for outrage! is the English translation of the bestseller Indignez-vous!, written by French Résistance member and concentration camp survivor Stéphane Hessel (2011). In the context of local and global movements (the Indignados in southern Europe, the Arab Spring in north Africa and the Middle East, the Occupy Movement in United States), feelings of outrage at a lack of basic rights such as access to housing, health, education and decent employment in the context of the politics of neoliberalism, austerity and inequality (Harvey, 2011) inspired thousands of people toward critical inquiry, collective debates and mobilisation. Occupying, discussing and organising life in public squares and beyond was for many both a cause and an effect of the collectivisation of emotions like anger, fear (Cossarini, 2014) and hope (Delgado, 2016). While some authors emphasised the political benefits of those emotions in crafting political subjectivites and actions that conform to an us, a “we, the people” (ibid.), others alerted to the fact that emotions cementing collective mobilisation could in fact turn, without broader political discussions, into a dualistic “we–the other” (Laclau, 2005; Žižek, 2006). Nowadays, the actual proliferation of right- and left-wing populisms everywhere has reactivated old and raised new debates on the strategic function of emotions in politics (Demertzis, 2006; Canovan, 1999; Thomassen, 2014; Roberts, 2014).

This explicit consideration of the role of emotions in politics is relatively new. Although ancient Greek philosophers such as Homer, Plato and Aristotle discussed the political relevance of emotions regarding rhetoric and the desire for recognition (in Greek pathos and thumos, cognate with English passion and spiritedness (Koziak, 1994)), ancient and modern political philosophy has had a long history of disregard for and suspicion of the information that emotions provide. By an absolute distinction between emotion and reason, emotions have been disdained as irrational, feminine, risky or counterproductive to what is deemed “properly political” (Mouffe, 2002). Still, nowadays we tend to “suppose that only fascist or aggressive societies are intensely emotional” (Nussbaum, 2013: 15). Nevertheless, emotions participate (unavoidably) in diverse political processes in all societies. As political scientists inspired by social and behavioural psychologists have recently shown, emotions influence political opinions, choices and participation. Emotional experiences guide perceptions and the processing of political information (Nabi, 2003; Lodge and Taber, 2005); anger seems to mobilise people into long-term participatory habits, while fear has a more ephemeral effect (Valentino et al., 2009) and anxiety increases support for protective policies regarding immigration, terrorism, health and climate change (Albertson and Gadarian, 2015). Also, scholars have shown that candidates for election make use of emotional appeals and performativity in the pursuit of their desired electoral ends (Ridout and Searles, 2011; Schurr, 2013). These are just a few examples that show emotions are politically relevant for all political actors and not only those at the public squares.

I. Introduction

4

Nevertheless, the omnipresence of emotions in politics goes beyond established practices of government or decision making (politics) but permeates “the political”, that is, the structuring principles of the power relationships and struggles present in the established social order1. As Eva Illouz introduces in Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007), several core modern authors (such as Weber, Marx, Simmel, Durkheim), have, if not developed concrete theories of emotions, constantly referred to them (anxiety, love, guilt,) when analysing the social organisation of capitalism. Marx, for example, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, explained how an emotional process (alienation) was central to explaining the relationships between workers, labour and the creation of surplus value (Illouz, 2007). Emotions also are, as I introduced in the opening paragraph of this chapter, fundamental in shaping “the political” dimension in conflicts and ruptures of social order. Recuperating “the emotional” from modern sociological accounts, Illouz argues, transforms the way we usually understand the division between the private and the public.

This thesis brings this now almost common sense acknowledgment of the relevance of emotions for the understanding of power dynamics, political subjectivities and mobilisation into the analysis of environmental conflicts, understood here as social conflicts produced by the asymmetrical access and distribution of environmental costs and benefits (Robbins, 2012a; Martínez-Alier, 2002). In doing so, this thesis aims to follow and advance the field of political ecology, which has recently shown – especially thanks to feminist political ecologists – that environmental conflicts “are not only economic, social, or rational choice issues, but also emotive realities that have a direct bearing on how resources are accessed, used, and fought over” (Sultana, 2011: 163; see also Nightingale, 2011a, 2013; Sultana, 2015).

Political ecology approaches environmental issues through the lens of social and distributional conflict, paying close attention to the power structures expressed through nature (Armiero, 2008; Peet and Watts, 2004; Le Billon, 2015; Martínez-Alier, 2002; Robbins, 2012a). Political ecologists, therefore, understand environmental conflicts as “ecological distribution conflicts”, in other words, conflicts arising from the unequal distribution of environmental goods and bads associated with using and appropriating nature. Conflicts are conceptualised as having driven through increasing scarcities, which result from increased social metabolisms; resource enclosures or appropriations by state authorities, private firms or social elites; or when local groups secure control over collective resources at the expense of others by leveraging management interventions by development authorities, state agents or private firms (Robbins, 2012a). Several political ecologists have analysed how, in the gestation and development of conflicts, people’s behaviours and livelihoods (actions), their thoughts about the environment (ideas), and who they think they are (identities)

1. See the distinction between “the political” and “politics” defined by Chantal Mouffe: “By ‘the political’, I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by ‘the politics’ I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political” (Mouffe, 2005: 9).


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are all interconnected (Bebbington, 1996; Li, 1996; Robbins, 2012b), and thus produce a complex picture of the arenas where environmental conflicts take place. Political ecologists seek, also, to acknowledge, contribute and problematise processes of resistance to natural resource extraction and the creation of alternatives (Martínez-Alier et al., 2010).

Similar to other fields, emotions have not found explicit consideration in political ecology until recently, since conflicts have usually been explained as “purely rational” differences related to diverging knowledge, values, discourses and interests in relation to nature and natural resources. Since incorporating emotions into the analysis can enable better understandings of how social and economic orders develop, how political subjectivities are built and how and why mobilisation takes place, this lack of attention towards the role of emotions in political ecology has generated an incomplete understanding of how power operates in environmental conflicts. Several feminist and affect political ecologists and geographers have already explored this gap, expanding our knowledge about how emotions help collectives maintain their rights over the “commons” (Nightingale, 2011a; Singh, 2013), how individuals and communities face individual ecological bads, such as water shortages and contamination (Sultana, 2011), and how emotional attachment to places act as a motor for activism and the creation of political identities (Brown and Pickerill, 2009b).

Nevertheless, as political ecologists, we still need to better understand how environmental conflict feels2 and how those feelings contribute or interfere with power relationships. We first need a framework that can guide our analysis of the relationships between emotion, power and environmental conflict. Furthermore, if political ecology is indeed interested in analysing emotions, it cannot turn a blind eye to the types of emotions commonly termed negative, or towards the fear, anger, pain and sorrow that usually accompany conflicts where, violence, insecurity and resource scarcity harm humans “in physical, symbolic, cultural, and emotional terms” (Peluso and Watts, 2001: 26).

This thesis draws a theoretical framework for the consideration of emotions in political ecology, and reflects upon these negative emotions and their relationships with power and conflict, following a post-structuralist understanding of power. My focus on emotion seeks to understand how, within the context of environmental conflicts, emotions participate in the ways in which people accept, internalise and resist norms that dictate certain ways of speaking, acting and being in relation to others, resources, and places. In considering that negative emotions in contexts of physical and subjective violence can prevent the mobilisation of local communities, my work also considers whether psychotherapeutic practice can be useful for both locals and for political ecology researchers studying the relationships between power, conflict and emotions.

2. Paraphrasing the famous “How does capitalism feel?” posed by feminist and queer scholars (see Cvetkovich, 2012 and the Feel Tank, http://feeltankchicago.net/ [Last accessed 02.05. 2017]).

I. Introduction

6

2. Aims and Summary of the Main Argument

The overarching aim of this thesis is to analyse how emotions influence the politics of environmental conflicts. Through the lens of political ecology, engaging with “the politics of environmental conflicts” implies understanding how power relationships, asymmetries and struggles constitute people, places and resources (Paulson et al., 2003). In this thesis, I explore how emotions participate in processes of subjectivity formation (subject-making), that is, processes whereby individual and collective subjectivities are constructed, mediated by power. I am interested in comprehending the role emotions play in the processes in which subjectivities are subjugated to authority (what I name in this thesis “disciplined subjectivation”) and how responses to those mechanisms individually and collectively operate (what I name “political subjectivation”). My conceptualisation of disciplined subjectivation is inspired by Foucault’s conceptualisation of discipline and governmentality, that is, understanding the capacity of individuals to accept, internalise and exhibit “self-control” for the sake of maintaining the circulation and distribution of certain social positions and spatial organisation (Foucault, 1979, 1990; Lemke, 2001). My conceptualisation of political subjectivation is inspired by Rancière’s thoughts on the processes of political rupture to the dominant order, when people disobey or reject the discipline that dictate speaking, acting and being in a certain way in certain spaces (Rancière, 1992; García-Lamarca, 2017). Although there are significant differences between Foucault and Rancière’s conceptualisations of the processes of subjectivity formation and of “the political”3, I do not aim to open up a discussion on those particularities, but to set the scenario where I analyse the role of emotions in processes of subjectivity formation.

Understanding how emotions participate in the circulation of power within people’s thoughts and practices is particularly important in order to expand our understanding (conceptually, methodologically and empirically) of how hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ideas and practices (i.e., power) regarding environmental issues are incorporated and resisted into subjectivities, processes in which emotions in general and negative emotions in particular need to be considered4. I operationalise such a purpose by means of three further targeted objectives. First, this thesis defines a theoretical framework that can inspire the consideration by political ecology of emotions in relation to environmental conflicts and struggles; second, it seeks to understand how and why particular emotions such as anger, sorrow and pain affect environmental grassroots subjectivities and actions (political subjectivation), and how states and private sector entities seek to prevent those by governing subjectivities (disciplined

3. See Tassin (2012) for a clarification of the similarities and differences in understanding of the process of subjectivity formation for different authors such as Foucault, Rancière, Arendt, Deleuze and Žižek.

4. In this thesis, I use the terms hegemony and counter-hegemony in their “ordinary” meaning, referring to power domination and control (hegemony) and attempts to dismantle hegemonic power (counter-hegemony); I am thus not engaging with Gramscian theoretical development of those concepts.


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subjectivation); and third, it explores whether emotional reflexivity through psychotherapeutic practice can support activists’ processes of political subjectivation in environmental conflicts. Eventually, through a synthesis of these results, the thesis discusses political and research-oriented opportunities that a consideration of emotions, when analysing environmental conflicts, offers to both scholars and activists.

In this thesis I contribute to the incipient interest of political ecologists in including emotions in their analysis of environmental conflicts, thus advancing the emergence of “Emotional Political Ecologies”. I shall argue that emotions play contradictory roles in environmental conflicts, since they can act as channels for the subversion of hegemonic power in environmental activism, as well as help the reproduction of hegemonic power dynamics via governmentality and social oppression dynamics. This claim is based on conceptual and empirical research: providing first a theoretical framework that can inspire research that considers the multiple dimensions of emotions, and afterwards developing empirical research into two case studies that reveal the multiple layers and ambivalent roles of emotions, which inform, reproduce and interrupt the political in environmental conflicts. Considering the emotional as a political space, that is, a space of ambivalence, power and conflict, offers opportunities towards the politics of socio-environmental movements and to political ecologists to better understand and act in the face of power asymmetries in environmental conflicts.

3. Research Gaps

Three main sets of (interlinked) research gaps guide this thesis. Since the recent “emotional turn” in political ecology is inspired by a broad range of theoretical approaches – such as feminist political ecology, resource management, emotional geographies, affective theories, anthropology, psychology and sociology of emotion (see Sultana, 2011; Nightingale, 2013; Singh, 2013; Escobar, 2014) – I contribute to this by proposing a framework that facilitates more systematic research in this field. I propose this framework by means of a critical literature review (Chapter II), which also serves to introduce the other two gaps I explore in subsequent chapters: the role of so called “negative” emotions in environmental struggles (Sultana, 2011) and the implications and possibilities of political ecologies of healing (Middleton, 2010).

As I explain in the following pages, although political ecologists acknowledge negative emotions, they remain underexplored while positive, loving and caring engagements with nature seem to receive more attention when analysing the emotional and affectual lives of communities in defence of their territories. Deciding to analyse emotions such as anger, sorrow, and powerlessness marks, therefore, a political commitment of this thesis, a commitment to make visible, as well as de-romanticise, the emotional “interior life” (Pulido, 2003: 47) of environmental conflicts.

I. Introduction

8

Moreover, by acknowledging the existence of those negative emotions in conflicts, I suggest that political ecology needs to fill the research gap that has kept “liberation ecologies” – dedicated to analysing how “modes of production create appropriate forms of consciousness, ideologies, and politics and have a certain level and type of effect on [the] natural environment” (Peet and Watts, 2004: 28) – distant from “liberation psychologies”, whose aim is to work practically on the intimate relationship between personal and social alienation (Martín-Baró, 1986). By filling this gap, political ecologists will be in a better position to understand and act upon the psycho-social implications of environmental dispossessions and activism (such as trauma, depression, solastalgia5), or said differently, those emotional “chains” that bind human relationships to nature and power. Following this rationale, I examine whether psychotherapeutic practice can contribute towards activists and political ecologists’ understanding of the role of emotions in environmental mobilisation.

4. Research Questions and Structure of the Thesis

Aims and gaps are addressed in the following chapters of this thesis, guided by a general research question: What role do emotions play in the politics of environmental conflicts? Some of the chapters have been published as papers or submitted for publication, a fact that explains some repetition in the chapters.

Chapter II follows this general research question through a critical theoretical review, introducing the research gaps that motivate the empirical chapters of this thesis. It presents a critical literature review of the different perspectives on the relationships between emotion, power and environmental conflict. After reviewing work within feminist political ecology, emotional geographies, social and cultural anthropology, social psychology and social movements theory, I propose a framework that enables a consideration of the multiple dimensions that intersect subjectivities in environmental conflicts. A variant of this chapter has been submitted (April 2017) for publication to Progress in Human Geography, as “The ‘emotional turn’ in political ecology: Mapping Emotional Political Ecologies for the study of environmental conflicts” (González-Hidalgo and Zografos).

Chapter III focuses on methodology, detailing the research philosophy, ethnographic approach and qualitative methods used to unpack my research question. I justify why I selected case studies in Chile and Mexico and outline the qualitative research methods used to collect data in each case – document review, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, participation of grassroots political events and focus groups – elaborating why and how I used them to answer my research questions. This chapter also explores my positionality and ethics.

5. Solastalgia refers to the pain or distress caused by the loss of, or inability to derive, solace connected to the negatively perceived state of one’s home environment produced by environmental change (Albrecht et al., 2007).


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Chapter IV explores the research gap related to the under exploration of negative emotions in relation to human engagements with nature and their role in shaping conflict. Research questions that guide this chapter are: (1) How and why emotions such as anger, sorrow and pain shape environmental grassroots subjectivities and mobilisation? (2) How do state and private sector entities (e.g., via policies and practices) try to prevent those emotions in the context of environmental conflicts? I analyse the emotional dimension of subject-making processes through the historical and contemporary development of forestry extractivism in southern Chile, specifically in and around indigenous Mapuche territories. By examining how state, private capital and local populations interact in the process of subjectivity formation, I show, on the one hand, that commercial forestry advances via securing the control of land through disciplinary interventions, aiming to form emotional subjects that can help secure capital accumulation and extractivism. On the other hand, I highlight the relevance of the collective expression of “negative” emotions such as anger and sorrow as crucial resources that help indigenous Mapuche communities maintain their resistance in facing territorial sovereignty claims. A variant of this chapter has been published along with Christos Zografos as González-Hidalgo, M., and Zografos, C., 2017. “How sovereignty claims and ‘negative’ emotions influence the process of subject-making: Evidence from a case of conflict over tree plantations from Southern Chile”, Geoforum 78, 61–73 (2017).

Chapter V develops the political ecologies of “healing”. The research question that guides this chapter is (How) Can psychotherapeutic practice help activists’ processes of political subjectivisation in environmental conflicts? I analyse the ways in which psychotherapeutic practice sheds light on indigenous and peasant subjectivation processes, through the analysis of Gestalt Therapy workshops organised by a local NGO in southern Mexico. I discuss the role of psychotherapeutic practice in facilitating individual and collective reflexivity, in pushing activists towards processes that “rupture” established subjectivations and in fostering political participation in community matters. While I remain critical of the limits of a depoliticised reflexivity that does not consider structural issues of power, I argue that the practice of psychotherapy aids political ecologists not only to better understand the relationship between personal, biographical stories and the dynamics and disappointments shaping or generating political action, but also to comprehend the private-public continuum of emotional expression. A variant of this chapter is available online as “The politics of reflexivity: Subjectivities, activism, environmental conflict and Gestalt Therapy in southern Chiapas”, published in Emotion, Space and Society (May 2017).

Chapter VI (Discussion and Conclusion) provides an overview of my main empirical arguments, and discusses their implications for current debates in political ecology around environmentality, oppression and environmental mobilisation. I argue that my empirical findings uncover a persistent and unresolved tension between the role of emotions as channels for the subversion of hegemonic power, as well as their role in reproducing hegemonic

I. Introduction

10

power dynamics. I suggest that this reveals “the emotional” as a space of power and conflict, and that acknowledging the ambivalent political work of emotions offers opportunities to better understand and transform power asymmetries in environmental conflicts. After offering some suggestions as to how to do this via activist and research practice, I conclude by inviting political ecologists towards a phenomenological understanding of the generation of environmental conflict, exploring new theoretical, methodological and action-research strategies.

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II. THE “EMOTIONAL TURN” IN POLITICAL ECOLOGY: MAPPING EMOTIONAL POLITICAL ECOLOGIES FOR THE STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICTS

There are no new ideas.

There are only new ways of making them felt.

Audre Lorde


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1. Introduction

For political ecologists, it is now almost commonsensical to acknowledge the role played by emotions for understanding power dynamics in environmental struggles. Anyone spending time in sites of environmental conflict is more than likely to perceive the emotional aroma of grassroots environmental struggles (Arboleda, 2015), or witness the suffering of communities exposed to violence when struggling to keep their land, water and environment (Global Witness, 2014). Emotions also play a relevant role in conflict prevention strategies of private sector and state institutions, as pointed out by scholars analysing environmental sustainability and ‘corporate social responsibility’ initiatives (d’Aoust, 2014). A look at the Scopus database shows that political ecologists are increasingly interested in the role of emotions in relation to environmental and resource governance and conflicts. Eleven papers, all of them published after 2011, include in their title, abstract or keywords the terms “emotion” and “political ecology” (Croog, 2016; Dallman et al., 2013; Doshi, 2016; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2013; Horowitz, 2013; Nightingale, 2012; 2013; Pratt, 2012; Raento, 2016; Sultana, 2011; Wooden, 2014). If the research is expanded to include “affect” we find one more (Münster, 2016), and if we include “feeling” we find some additional articles (McGregor, 2004; Mariki et al., 2015; Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2010).

Although emotions have of course always “been there” – “labelled” differently when examining everyday life in sites of environmental conflicts – discussing their relevance in political ecology has never been easy. Introducing emotions into public and activist debates has regularly been categorised as irrelevant in contrast to the “real and important issues” at stake in environmental conflicts (Velicu, 2015). The recent “emotional turn” in political ecology is the result of hard work by feminist geographers and political ecologists, who for decades have pushed a critical research agenda on environmental and resource conflicts, power and subjectivities, which leaves room for emotional, affectual and embodied aspects, by turning them political. This field has only recently been “baptised” as “Emotional Political Ecology”, in Farhana Sultana’s chapter at the International Handbook of Political Ecology (2015). Sultana pushes political ecology into the realm of emotions, as the intersection of feminist political ecology, resource management and emotional geographies. Moreover, other political ecologists interested in emotions are inspired by other literatures such as affective theories, anthropology, psychology and sociology of emotion (Nightingale, 2013; Singh, 2013; Escobar, 2014). This shows that the range of theoretical approaches and starting points through which relationships between emotion, power and environmental conflict can be analysed is quite broad, and synthesising it into a coherent conceptual framework could be highly beneficial in order to facilitate more systematic research in this field. This is the aim of this chapter. To reach this aim, I critically review contributions inspired by feminist political ecology, emotional geographies, social and cultural anthropology, social movement theories and social psychology. I then synthesise review findings in a conceptual framework with the intention to provide some guidance for

II. Theoretical Review

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exploring the complexity, multiple dimensions and political relevance of emotions in political ecology research, which constitutes the emerging field of Emotional Political Ecologies6 (EmPEs hereafter). My aspiration in this chapter is to show that understanding “the political” (a core interest of political ecology) as fed by several emotional dimensions and diverse emotional engagements with nature expands the ways in which political ecologists think of conflicts and subjectivities.

Since my aim is to analyse how different bodies of work contribute to our understanding of the relationship between environmental conflict, power and emotion, some short clarifications of those terms are needed. I understand environmental conflicts as social conflicts produced by asymmetrical access and distribution of environmental benefits and costs (Robbins, 2012a; Martínez-Alier, 2002). Those conflicts are usually related to the clash of different languages of valuation towards socionatures7, as well as to inclusions/exclusions along social differences such as ethnicity, race, class, gender, and religion. Those values are not always “cognitive” but are also emotional, as they are about what one is allowed to remember, feel, enjoy or live (Velicu, 2015).

As concerns power, I adopt a post-structuralist understanding, focusing on subjectivity. I am interested in understanding how power constitutes processes of “disciplined subjectivation” and “political subjectivation”, that is, the ways in which people accept, internalise or resist norms that dictate certain ways of speaking, acting and “being” in relation to others, resources, and places in the context of environmental conflicts (Foucault,1979; Butler, 1997; Rancière, 1992; Paulson et al., 2003). This perspective goes beyond an understanding of power as only sovereign, dominating and subjugating (see Peet et al., 2011: 31-34), shedding light upon ways in which power circulates within people’s thoughts and practices. Such a perspective does not deny the subjugating and exploitative consequences that capitalist/ extractive/ neoliberal processes have on local populations in the context of environmental conflicts, where insecurity, resource scarcity and violence harm humans “in physical, symbolic, cultural, and emotional terms” (Peluso and Watts, 2001: 26), but instead shows how those dynamics shape (socially produced) subjectivities.

Following everyday usage of the word, I use “emotions” as an umbrella term, which includes affects, expressions, moods, feelings, climates and non-representational ways (Thrift, 2008; Delgado et al., 2016) in which humans perform their feelings and build their relationships to/in socionatures. I do not delve deeper into the conceptual differences between emotions and affects (see Pile, 2010; Bondi, 2005a; Tolia-Kelly, 2006; Thien, 2005a), since, like Sarah Ahmed,

6. I prefer the plural to acknowledge diversity.

7. Political ecologists use the term socionature to emphasize the inseparability of processes in society and nature (see Swyngedouw, 1999).


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I am more interested in what emotions do, rather than what emotions are (Ahmed, 2004: 4). Still, it is important to acknowledge the political tension between emotional geographers, who seek to personalise emotional experience as a way of exposing inequality, and affectual geographers, who emphasise non-cognitive, inter-personal and non-representational characteristics of affects (Pile, 2010). My take on emotions does not contrast emotions to “objectivity”, “facts”, “materiality” or “rationality” (see Fraser, 1995 and Butler, 1998 on the false distinction between the material and the cultural), as this has been the reason why the expression of emotions with relation to politics has been historically de-legitimised (Velicu, 2015). If we consider emotions as part and parcel of power relationships, environmental conflicts are also emotional conflicts (Sultana, 2011). The chapter proceeds by looking at how the fields of feminist political ecology, emotional geography, social and cultural anthropology, social psychology and social movement theory examine the relation between environmental conflict, power, and emotion. Those labels stand uneasily since several approaches are inter-related; however, labels allow me to explore commonalities and different assumptions when talking about emotions. After summarising how political ecology studies take inspiration from each reviewed perspective, I discuss the common ground among the different perspectives, arguing in favour of multidimensional EmPEs research in order to consider the constitution of emotional subjectivities in environmental conflicts. I then explore the relevance of discussing “the political” in EmPEs, presenting a conceptual framework which incorporates diverse dimensions for the analysis of emotions in environmental conflicts and acknowledges, but also moves beyond, the ambivalent roles played by emotions with regards to asymmetrical “power distributions” in environmental conflicts. I conclude by discussing gaps that set a research agenda for the development of engaged research in EmPEs.

2. Emotions, Subjectivities and Conflicts: Mapping Diverse Understandings

2.1 Feminist Political Ecologies: from Acknowledging Emotions and Gender Identities to Performative Subjectivities

Although Sultana’s chapter (2015) signposts the recent turning point towards emotion in political ecology, political ecologists have been meandering around emotions for quite some time, especially thanks to feminist political ecologists. Early texts such as Rocheleau et al.’s Feminist Political ecology (1996), were committed to analysing resource struggles through a gendered look, engaging everyday practices, micro-politics of households and women’s environmental struggles “from the ground up”. This intimate engagement inevitably revealed other – usually under-explored or disdained – ways of environmentalism via “affection for place” (Bru-Bistuer, 1996: 119) and “emotionalism” (Seager, 1996: 277). While advancing the idea that there are concrete gendered differences in experiences of, responsibilities for, and interests in “nature” and “the environment”, feminist political ecologists also argued how those other environmentalisms derive from the


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social interpretation of biology and social constructs of gender, rather from biological differences (Rocheleau et al., 1996). Although the issue of “the emotional” in relation to environmentalism was not a deliberate focus of attention for early feminist political ecologists, they did find it relevant for critically analysing the way in which “feminine” roles were allocated in society. Engaging with broader feminist and cultural studies scholarship (see Harding, 1991; Haraway, 1988), those authors denounced how environmental crises are usually analysed through western conceptions which devalue “what is associated with women and nature, emotion, animals, the body, while simultaneously privileging those things associated with men, reason, culture, humanity, and the mind” (Guard, 1993, cited in McMahon, 1997). Acknowledging the right of environmental movements to be emotional as a form of knowledge and expression of environmental concerns, without being diminished as irrational, hysterical or “feminine”, has been a shared claim for subsequent feminist political ecologists (Seager, 1996; Kimura, 2015; Velicu, 2015).

Emotions found a wider space to be considered in a second wave of feminist political ecology, which embraced post-structuralist and performative approaches in feminist theory (e.g., Butler, 2004; see Elmhirst, 2011). Through this approach, people are conceptualised as inhabiting multiple and fragmented identities, thus problematical naturalised and undifferentiated categories of individuals, social relationships and relationships between people and the environment (ibid.). Attention shifted towards subjectivities, as ways in which people are brought into relations of power, where subjects exercise, internalise or contradictorily reject multiple dimensions of power within the same acts (Butler, 1997; Nightingale, 2011a). Feminist political ecologists pushed post-structuralist ideas on power and subjectivity, exploring how power and social relations of difference are constantly (re)produced in everyday interactions with socionatures (Nightingale, 2011b; 2013; see Elmhirst, 2011). This idea that subjectivities are not contained within the body or the psyche, but emerge relationally in specific contexts and mediate conflicts over resources, also increased the interest of feminist political ecologists and geographers on the role of performativity, specifically on how gendered social practices come to be considered “identitarian” through their reiteration (Butler, 2004). This focus on practice and embodiment shifted geography interests from text and representations towards the political, economic and cultural geographies of specific “everyday practices”(Nash, 2000).

Studying the role of emotions is relevant for shedding light on human–human and human_non human interactions, as it helps to better explain how and why people engage in those relations, for example commoning8 relations (Nightingale, 2011a; Pratt, 2012). Nightingale (2013) incorporates emotions to examine how subjectivities are shaped by embodied interactions and human agency in socionatures. In an effort to explain the paradox of fishermen with strong emotional attachments to the sea that end up overexploiting it, she shows how fishermen shift between

8. Social practices of cooperation related to the commons: shared resources that are used by many individuals and communities- such as forests, fisheries, water, air, and also knowledge – under collectively defined rules that allow these communities to manage resources sustainably (García-López et al., 2015).


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diverse subjectivities related to the different spaces where they interact. While their attachments to the sea and cooperative daily practices on board their boats can result into self-regulating fishing effort, in policy meetings, where decisions about quotas, fishing effort, etc. take place, they feel uncomfortable when labelled by powerful others (e.g., trawlermen) as unruly, which provides a strong disincentive for self-regulation. Similarly, considering emotions and their embodied qualities serves to better understand motivations and behaviours in social movements (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2013), showing also the intimate, emotional and power-laden embodiments of unequal socionatures of consumption, waste and resource distribution (Doshi, 2016).

Embodied and relational subjectivities can also be fed by emotional encounters with the “significant (animal) otherness” (Haraway, 2003). For example, Raento (2016) very interestingly shows how horses’ subjectivity – their ability to adapt to and participate with multiple roles in numerous political, economic, and cultural networks as labourers, producers, caretakers, therapists, entertainers and consumers – is relevant for understanding the strategic role of horses in co-producing modern state institutions and governance. Although this literature is relevant to the topic of emotions, in this review I narrow down the focus to the relevance of human subjectivities, be they informed by human or non-human encounters.

The recent focus on emotion has helped political ecologists to expand their understanding of conflicts by illustrating ways in which embodied emotions reveal how nature-society relations are experienced on a daily basis (Sultana, 2011). Bujis and Lawrence (2013) argue that there are diverse aspects of forestry conflicts in which emotions are to be considered: emotions as sources of diverging views on resource management, emotional influences on the processing of information, the motivating power of emotions for social movements and the role of emotions in the escalation of protests. For example, Horowitz (2013) reflects upon conflict in a suburban wetland in New Jersey, showing how different perspectives about how to manage the wetland raised a conflict on the understanding of what was and what was not vulnerable, backed by emotional appeals based on self-interest, and care and concern for others. Sultana (2011) reflects upon how emotions and their private/public expression play a key role in producing (gender) subjectivities and the framing in which people claim access to safe water, when she analyses expressions of suffering of women accessing arsenic-polluted, scarce water in Bangladesh. As regards conflicts and mobilisation, Dallman et al. (2013) show how the spatial connections between emotion, memory and identity related to spirituality sustains indigenous resistance as well as affective bonds among activists.

While Bujis and Lawrence (2013) reveal different aspects of conflicts where the role of emotions should be considered, EmPEs still lack a clear picture of the different dimensions that feed emotions in environmental conflicts. In what follows, I review work in the fields of emotional geographies and social and cultural anthropology, as well as literature on social movements and contributions from social psychology, with the intention to identify those dimensions (Figure


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II.1) and use them later on in the chapter for building a conceptual framework for EmPEs. While EmPEs are interested in the political consequences of emotions in environmental conflicts (Nightingale, 2013), by reviewing those bodies of literature my intention is to acknowledge and show that, when considering “the emotional”, “the political” appears as being constituted by several (emotional) dimensions.

Figure II.1 Bodies of literature that feed my review of EmPEs

Emotional Political Ecologies (EmPEs)

Social psychology

Social and cultural

anthropology Social movement

theories

Feminist political ecology

Emotional geographies

2.2 Emotional Geographies: Emotions as Engagements with Places and Environments

Several feminist political ecologists interested in emotions (Nightingale, 2013; Sultana, 2013, 2015; Dallman et al., 2013; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2013) have been inspired by work in emotional geographies. Emotional geographies bring a spatially engaged approach to the study of emotions (Davidson et al., 2005), inspired by humanistic, feminist and non-representational geographies (Pile, 2010; Bondi, 2005a). For emotional geographers, emotions are ways of knowing, being and doing, mediated by socio-spatial relationships, as well as “connective tissues that link experiential geographies of the human psyche and physique with(in) broader social geographies of place” (Davidson and Milligan, 2004: 524).

Emotional geographies privilege people’s expressed emotional experiences: emotional experiences and feelings are socially embedded but are localisable in bodies, which define the location of the psychological subject (Pile, 2010). This is the political imperative of emotional geography: to draw out personal-spatial experiences (the geographical), to bring them to representation. Focusing on human emotion (as opposed to non-localisable affect) allows emotional geographers to make visible the hard-fought political battles over identity. That is, to consider how “affective capacities of any body are signified unequally within social spaces of


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being and feeling” (Tolia-Kelly, 2006: 213). This is distinct to affectual or non representational geographies, where the subject is non-psychological, since “affect is a quality of life that is beyond cognition and always interpersonal. It is, moreover, inexpressible: unable to be brought into representation” (Pile 2010: 8, Thrift, 2004).

Emotional geographies provide a very rich understanding of intimate encounters taking place in socionatures, which develop in human bodies or psyches and occur as relational and intersubjective processes (Thien, 2005b) between humans, communities and in attachment to places, etc. For example, the framework of emotional geographies enables Panelli et al. (2004) to de-construct ideas of rural communities as emotionally harmonious, safe and peaceful spaces, by analysing women’s experiences of fear. It also allows Pini et al. (2010) to consider locals’ contradictory emotions related to a mine closure, Matthee (2004) to analyse everyday food rituals of female farm workers and their relevance for shaping their relations and spaces of resistance, and Kearney (2009) to explore how emotive narratives shape indigenous relationships towards their homelands and waters.

While emotional geographers explore place as being simultaneously intimate, private, collective and public, political ecologists take this and emphasise further “the political”, that is, on how those emotions build individual and collective political subjectivities and have practical consequences in the ways socionatures are managed or disputed (see Nightingale, 2013). Generally speaking, emotional geographers do not discuss into detail the question of how different emotional terrains result into asymmetrical power relationships and struggles. For example, contributions to the seminal volume Emotional Geographies (Davidson et al., 2005), very interestingly explain how emotions produce and are reproduced distinctly in different spaces, but do not engage with the political economy or economic geographies of landscapes as political ecologists tend to do. In that sense, emotional geographies perspectives tend to focus on emotional subjectivities or personal feelings related to certain spaces, but the implications of those in terms of broader power relationships are usually under-explored or not very explicitly argued. Pain (2009) acknowledges this separation between emotional geographies and political geography and argues how bringing in emotionality when analysing (geo)politics can help us get away from individualised understandings of emotions, and consider emotions as part of constellations of wider individual and collective landscapes, tied to power geometries, and permeated by class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Overall, the detailed exploration of emotional geographies of individual and collective spatial experiences (the geographical) serves political ecologists to better understand how and why individuals and groups – into asymmetrical power relationships – engage differently with territories of conflict. Such accounts can be useful for political ecologists when researching and denouncing the differential emotional impacts that environmental conflicts have upon subjectivities.


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2.3 Social and Cultural Anthropology Studies of Relational, Affective Subjectivities: the More-Than-Human

Debates around emotions in eco-political contexts are present in fields other than emotional and feminist geographies, where affective theories (in and beyond geography) have a relevant role. I do not delve here either into the discussion between emotional-ists and affect-ists, or in the extensive literatures of affect (in cultural anthropology, geography, sociology, etc). Taking the risk of been accused for a simplified understanding of affect, I nevertheless reiterate the importance of taking into account notions such as inter-subjectivity and affective labor, which help us consider more-than-human-ess as experiences that also feed the emotions of those embedded in power relations in environmental conflicts. A focus on the more-than-human dimension emphasises vital materiality and new ontologies of human beings in order to rethink human subjectivity and agency (Bennet, 2009; Singh, 2013). Although the question of more-than-human, post-humanism and trans-humanism has generated debates in geography (see Castree et al., 2004), I here focus on contributions from cultural anthropology interested in “the totality of relations existing between persons and their environments” (Ingold, 2017), since they discuss how (emotional) communication between human and non-human takes place.

Escobar’s take of Fals-Borda and Galeano’s term sentipensar (thinking-feeling) is probably among the most celebrated anthropology contributions to political ecology which illustrate the relevance of considering affect with relation to environmental struggles. As Escobar puts it: “Sentipensar with the territory means to think with the heart and with the mind, or heart-think (co-razonar), as Zapatistas say” (Escobar, 2014: 16; own translation). In the context of decolonial debates, acknowledging the relevance of emotions and affects when thinking of territories and subjectivities is only part of a broader project of “epistemic disobedience”, versus the systematic, institutionalised devaluation of knowledge and ways of knowing of the colonised (Grosfoguel, 2007; Mignolo and Escobar, 2013). Therefore, I also consider perspectives relevant for research on environmental conflicts that indigenous and decolonial scholars have brought into the study of human-nature relationships (see Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999; Dé Ishtar, 1998). Those scholars engage their work with debates beyond the realm of geographical and Anglo-Saxon academic environments, acknowledging the colonising work implicit in much of anthropological and geographical work (Nash, 2000; Bondi, 2005a; Thien, 2005a).

In this field, several authors acknowledge how subjectivities are built inspired by love (Milton, 2002) or caring (Singh, 2013) of nature, remembering ideas such as biophilia and deep ecology’ philosophies (Naess and Rothenberg, 1989). Through this perspective, EmPEs incorporate perspectives of “living with” nature (Turnhout et al., 2013, cited in Fletcher et al., 2015), dwelling (“the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence”, Ingold, 2000: 153), embodiment (Valera, 1992, cited in


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Fletcher et al., 2015), and indigenous or postcolonial perspectives where the world is conceived as a whole, where everything is connected to everything – knowledge, spirituality, gender, health, power, etc. (Middleton, 2015; Mignolo and Escobar, 2013).

This emphasis on the inter-subjective communication among humans and socionatures helps comprehend the unstable affective boundaries between humans and the non-human where “people’s sense of self and subjectivity are intertwined with their biophysical environment” (Singh, 2013: 190). The human body is understood as always related to or interconnected with other ‘bodies’, be they animal, technological, cultural or ideological (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2013). This perspective also echoes broad ontologies of bodies inspired by Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza: ‘‘a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’’ (Deleuze, 1988: 127). Material characteristics of nature are relevant, since materiality intermeshes with subjectivities formation: “things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals –... act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennet, 2009: viii). In a different but conceptually related line, several political ecologists have discussed the redefinition of the dialectical unity between humans and nonhumans inspired by Hardt and Negri’s idea of affective labor (Hardt, 1999). They emphasise the relevance of practices and labor from below as constitutive of subjectivities: “affects refer to the power to affect and be affected; and a focus on affects in our labouring (and everyday practices) draws attention to the potential of these practices to produce new ways of being, new subjectivities, and new forms of human communication and cooperation” (Singh, 2013: 190). Such a focus helps political ecologists to better understand how subjectivities are framed by an affective biopower “from below” (expressed as embodied practices, cooperation and communication) and consider how those feed into or contest dominant govermentalising or hegemonic forces in environmental conflicts (ibid.). Affective agency in and between human and nonhuman natures can inspire “life affirming” social becomings (ibid.) but also political solidarities that seek to enhance democratic socioecological processes (Arboleda, 2015).

In a nutshell, a cultural and social anthropology perspective towards human-environment relationships provides a glimpse through which environmental conflicts can be explained as mediated through embodied and emotional encounters with “the more-than-human”. However, as I will argue in the discussion section of this chapter, this line of research has tended towards “optimism”, under-exploring the relevance of so called “negative” affects –such as anger, sorrow, anxiety– towards socionatures, that is affects that are different or even counter to love or caring practices, which also inform emotions in sites of conflict.


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2.4 Social Psychology: Emotional Impacts of Environmental Change and Conflicts

If social and cultural anthropology emphasises more-than-human subjectivities and agency, the focus of psychology and related studies tends to be quite the opposite: human-centric, focused on “the psyche” and mainly privileging the individual over the collective. I have reviewed here works that analyse the psycho-social9 impacts related to toxicity (Auyero and Swistun, 2009), permanent droughts (Anderson, 2009), climate change (Albrecht, 2011), or hard working (e.g., mining) conditions (Campbell, 1997). This work includes publications in the fields of human health studies, medical anthropology, economic psychiatry or environmental psychology. Their social psychological or psychosocial perspective in environmental conflicts enables EmPEs to understand how individual, collective and cross-generational subjectivities in sites of environmental conflicts are shaped by experiences of emotional distress, reduction in life satisfaction, mental un-health or feelings of powerlessness, experiences which intersect also with others related to power inequalities (see Markstrom et al., 2003).

Psychological assessments in sites of environmental conflicts can have political/strategical benefits: grassroots organisations and NGOs usually denounce mental or psychological impacts of environmental conflicts, in cases where medical and psychological evidence can help to publicly acknowledge how emotional stress relates to power asymmetries in environmental conflicts. For example, in the EJ atlas of environmental conflicts, 538 cases of the 2044 cases reported worldwide10

indicate “Health impacts: mental problems including stress, depression and suicide”.

However, psychology is usually critiqued as European- and scientific-centric, individualising, diagnosis-oriented and dis-connected from political issues. Although not focused explicitly on environmental conflicts, some scholars have criticised the use of “psychological labels” such as “trauma” and “victims” in sites of conflicts, because of their impacts upon local communities’ subjectivities. For example, in her work on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Fassin (2008) criticises how political arguments focused on trauma (a psychological diagnosis) rather than reporting the brutality of suffering and violence produce a particular form of subjectification, transform demands for justice into the exhibition of pain. Fassin is just one among several that have raised doubts on the political implications of psychiatry and psychotherapeutic languages and practices, for their aims to “govern the soul” (Rose, 1999) and their role in emphasising individual responsibility and suffering as a narrative for recognition (lllouz, 2007). Similar concerns have been raised regarding historical memory social movements related to post-dictatorship and human rights (see Traverso, 2006, for the case in Spain), where authors argue how a focus on narratives based on memories related to civil war, although necessary, has tended to produce a generic picture of victims, which tends to be reductionist, stereotyped and romanticised.

9. Psychosocial refers to the study of the relationships between the social and the psychic, considered as inextricably interrelated (Woodward, 2015).

10. See the Environmental Justice Atlas, https://ejatlas.org/ [Last accessed 15.05. 2017].


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However, this focus help taking into account the “negative”, difficult or traumatic emotional experiences about socionatures in conflicts, beyond the “loving nature” experiences narrated by some political ecologists and cultural anthropologists. This also opens a point of encounter between (postcolonial) psychology (Moane and Sonn, 2014) and cultural and social anthropology: healing. Middleton’s Political Ecology of Healing calls political ecologists to pursue a “necessarily politicised emphasis on the ways in which cultural and epistemic factors (including intergenerational trauma, healing, and decolonisation) determine human-environment relations” (2010: 18). She claims how, in order to better understand human-environment interactions in historically colonised communities, elements of the political ecology approach must be combined with literature addressing intergenerational trauma survival and healing, particularly from indigenous perspectives. She shows how indigenous rituals and ceremonies help communities to collectively confront their present and inter-generational colonial traumas. This points to an interesting gap in the literature, which involves the low number of studies of the “healing” role that activism can potentially have (Anguelovski, 2013).

Despite criticisms of psychology as individualising and disconnected to broader political issues which resemble criticisms of Thrift’s work as universalist, an(ti)-historicist and ethnocentric (Nash, 2000; Bondi, 2005a; Thien, 2005a), considering the (individual and collective) psychological dimensions in the relationship between emotion, power, and environmental conflict is unavoidable for EmPEs. Bondi has stressed the importance of acknowledging the connection between experience, theory and practice when using psychoanalysis and geography, and has argued how psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutic theory and methods can feed geographical research on emotions, especially for the methodological challenges of understanding emotions as relational and individual, and how to deal with unconscious communication (Bondi, 2005a; 2014). If we, as political ecologists, are interested in the discussion of the emotional consequences of processes of extraction, violence and mobilisation present in environmental struggles, (social) psychology can help us to further understand how those processes are consciously and unconsciously elaborated, as well as how they intermingle with other emotional experiences.

2.5 Social Movements Theory: Emotions as Triggers for Eco-Political Action

While the former sections have discussed work that focuses on understanding the constitution of subjectivities via engaged practices and actions, scholars interested in social movements have emphasised the role of emotions as triggers for “contentious” action11, and thus, also, how those actions feed back into activist subjectivities. As with many other disciplines, social movements theory also experienced a moment of an “emotional turn”.

11. Action refers here to techniques that seek to disrupt or transform social order, such as demonstrations, strikes or riots, named “contentious politics” by Tarrow and Tilly (2007) versus Scott’s (1985) “everyday forms of resistance”.


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Especially after the 1990s, scholars began reflecting on how emotions can be triggers as well as limiting factors for initiating and sustaining mobilisation, protest and resistance (Jasper, 2012). This turn, as Velicu (2015) points out, happened as a response to dominant analyses in social movements theory in the 1950s which categorised emotions in collective action as irrational, traumatised, and as something “to control” (see also Goodwin et al., 2009). Consequently, social movement theorists, influenced also by feminist and queer studies’ emphasis on the blurring of the distinction between the public and the private, began considering how emotions played a role in public affairs, beyond the private sphere (Eklundh, 2013). Nowadays, several social movements theorists consider emotions as highly important for better understanding group structures, how collective identities are created, and how movements try to sustain, engage or stop their activism (Goodwin et al., 2009; Jasper, 1998, 2012).

Several social movements scholars have analysed the relevance of emotions for environmental or land struggles. For example, Woods et al. (2012) study the 1997 rural mobilisations in the UK by analysing the different emotions that are foregrounded as mobilisation proceeds, in what they call a ‘ladder of emotions’. They show how emotions related to perceived threats to a landscape or place-rooted way of living are motives for political mobilisation: anger, frustration and despair guide pathways for collective action, and successful mobilisation relies on participants overcoming initial emotions of fear or anxiety at protest activity, giving way to emotions of pleasure and pride that encourage activists and help reproduce and sustain campaigns. Raynes et al. (2016) follow Woods’ model to explore how emotion and place-based identities are central to the early stages and continuance of social movement organisation around anti-fracking actions. A similar perspective is developed by Poma and Gravante (2015), who analyse the narratives of people involved in environmental struggles (such as dam building in Spain and Mexico), showing how indignation, feeling of threat and place attachment move activists, but also joy and satisfaction nourish self-esteem and infuses a feeling that things can change. Also, others (Arboleda, 2015; Valli, 2015) have shown how collective affective labor or emotional expressions of dissent help to form political subjects in environmental conflicts.

Similarly to emotional geographers, spaces, places, or land where activism takes place can be a source of emotional leverage for movements. Bringing in emotional geographies to the analysis of social movements, Bosco (2006) shows how Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of assassinated and missing peoples in dictatorial times in Argentina, benefited from their mutual relationships as activists and attachment to their places of struggle (the public squares, las Plazas) for their emergence and cohesion. Bosco shows how Madres’ emotional labor and their sustained activism over time demonstrate that an open sense of place, i.e., place understood as a network of social relations that flow across space, is more important than the local, understood as a bounded geographic scale, in explaining how embeddedness, cohesion in


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social networks, and activism are maintained. Arenas (2015) also shows how a women’s march traversing Oaxaca (Mexico) produced, in its path, new collective emotional geographies with the potential to transform participants into activists.

Beyond this analysis of the strategic relevance of emotions in fostering or sustaining mobilisations, scholars also report how activists can be paralysed, burned-out and even commit suicide through feelings of dispossession or disillusionment (Brown and Pickerill, 2009b; García-Lamarca and Kaika, 2016). For EmPEs, it is still a pending issue to discuss how to deal emotionally and politically with such personal-political challenges, and thus move beyond the excessively “optimistic” picture that the framework of a “loving nature” portrays with reference to emotional encounters that can feed environmental mobilisations.

3. Looking for Common Grounds: Relational Emotions and Multidimensional EmPEs

I have reviewed different bodies of literature that contribute to discussing the political role(s) of emotions in sites of environmental conflicts. Several pieces of work present different conceptual understandings of emotions, subjectivities and conflicts that sit within different epistemological backgrounds12. There are those who focus primarily on bodies or individual characteristics as their systems of study, those who focus more on interpersonal processes, and those who opt to analyse community, collective and political dynamics. However, I identify a key aspect that they have in common: the focus on the relational formation of subjectivities and emotions.

Four of the five bodies of literature reviewed – namely, feminist political ecology, emotional geographies, social and cultural anthropology, and social movements – make their understanding of emotions and subjectivities as relational explicit, emphasising their socio-spatial mediation and thus differentiating themselves from those perspectives who understand emotions as “entirely interiorised subjective mental states” (Davidson et al., 2005: 3). Feminist political ecology studies emphasise the relevance of subjectivities and emotions in the constitution of intersectional13 power relationships (Rocheleau et al., 1996; Elmhirst, 2011; Rodó-de-Zárate, 2014; Sultana, 2013), aligned with the epistemological and political framework of political ecology14. Emotional political ecologists take from emotional geographies the emphasis of the co-construction of subjectivities and emotions with concrete spaces (Davidson et al., 2005), and politicise it. Social and cultural anthropologists take a step further in stressing this embodied

12. All the perspectives analysed here would come under a general epistemological framework of subjectivist approaches to social science, although there are manifested differences among them: some favour phenomenological research (Thrift), while others social constructivism (most feminist perspectives) or social action (social movements theorists).

13. Intersectionality aims to capture numerous relationships between different dimensions of power structures, such as gender, race, class, sexuality or age.


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relationality, and stress the mutual and un-representable relationships of affect, parenthood etc., among humans and non-human natures (Singh, 2013; Escobar, 2014; Mignolo and Escobar, 2013; Ingold, 2000). These conceptualisations help EmPEs to understand human-nonhuman relations beyond colonised categories of research, and represent a contingent epistemology for deploying a non-colonial research agenda, not only in indigenous contexts. My review has also shown how the human-human and human-space attachments and performances can inspire and sustain the activism of environmental movements (Arenas, 2015; Bosco, 2006; Poma and Gravante, 2015; Goodwin et al., 2009).

Instead, psychology tends to present a more closed understanding of subjectivity, more interested in the individual psyche, even when analysing groups or collectives. However, the work reviewed also shows a relational and non-static conceptualisation of emotions, where individual and collective subjectivities and emotions are built up in the context of occasional and long-term socio-natural, familiar and inter-generational processes, which shape their individual and collective characters (Auyero and Swistun, 2009; Middleton, 2010). As in the case of some contributions in emotional geography, this work tends to analyse relational emotions on a smaller scale, so that the intimate, the silences, personal and family dynamics can be considered, in ways that allow to better understand how humans elaborate, consciously or unconsciously (Bondi, 2014), their individual or collective, past and present, etc. emotional experiences in environmental conflicts.

As Sarah Ahmed (2014) argues, emotions function as a connecting “skin” where the social, collective, individual and unconscious all come to be separated, connected and delineated. The literatures here reviewed also depict this porous skin relevant for developing EmPEs (see figure II. 2), where the psychological, the more-than-human, the geographical, the social and the political can be considered as separated as well as connected, intermeshed, intersecting and influencing dimensions of the role of emotions in power relations in the context of environmental conflicts. Those relations and their porosities are described in Figure II. 2. Feminist political ecologies introduce the relevance of the political in the study of EmPEs; social movements contribute to the understanding of the social and issues related to collective action or mobilisation. Emotional geographies emphasise the geographical dimension in the constitution of relationships among humans and socionatures, whilst social and cultural anthropologists are more attentive to the role that more-than-humaness plays. And psychology deepens our understanding on how these emotional encounters and their impacts form part of individual and collective psyches.

14. The epistemological and political framework of political ecology, is, generally speaking, a “politicized acknowledgement of the co-production of environmental knowledge and social values in ways that, tentatively, try to reconstruct environmental explanations and interventions in the favour of vulnerable people” (Forsyth, 2008: 762).


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Figure II.2 Bodies of literature reviewed and their emphasis in different dimensions for the study of emotions in environmental conflicts.

Dimensions for analysis of emotions in environmental conflicts

The political

The geographical

The social

The more-than-human

The psychological

Feminist political ecology

Social movements

Emotional geographies

Social and cultural anthropology

Social psychology

Bodies of literature reviewed

Such multidimensional EmPEs could thus simultaneously analyse intimate encounters as well as political economy circumstances that feed subjectivised emotions in environmental conflicts. This can be better understood with an example: imagine landless indigenous individuals and collectives mobilised to recuperate territory. Their “mobilised landless subjectivity” (i. e. their political subjectivity) can be better understood if we take into account how power inequalities (political ecologies) frame now and have framed their unconsciously learnt perspectives of life from their present and past experiences of material and relational dispossession (social psychology), their relationships with the spaces they inhabit (emotional geographies), their engagements with the non-human natures they relate to everyday (social and cultural anthropology) and how these emotions facilitate/hinder in the building of resistance networks and collective action where they now participates (social movements theory).

This multi-dimensional understanding of emotions in sites of environmental conflicts unveils a complex picture of how individual and collective emotions simultaneously produce and are a result of power relationships in environmental conflicts. As shown with the example above, the framework tries to capture how “the political” – of a main interest to political ecologists – is constructed and interconnected to other dimensions. In doing so, the framework expands the ways in which political ecologists think of environmental conflicts, expanding our gaze towards “the interior life of politics” (Pulido, 2003: 47).


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4. Discussing the Political in EmPEs

The project of building multidimensional EmPEs needs to explicitly consider the main interest of political ecology: “the political”. Erik Swyngedouw defines the political as “the demand by those “that do not count” to be counted, named, and recognised” (2014: 8). In that sense, how do EmPEs place themselves towards, support or interrupt “the political” in environmental conflicts? I bring some reflections on this with a view to completing the framework previously presented (Figure II.2) into a conceptual framework for EmPEs.

The work that looks at the political role of emotions in environmental conflicts seems to be rather polarised. On the one side, some work tends to be politically optimistic, emphasising the positive or constructive role of emotions: emotions can act as driving forces or engagements with socionatures, building subjectivities that circulate dynamically and inter-relate with others’ subjectivities, places and nonhuman natures (Milton, 2002; Singh; 2013; Dallman et al., 2013; Nightingale, 2011a, 2013). Emotions can also act as triggers for political subjectivation and action in the realm of collective mobilisations (Bosco; 2006; Arenas, 2015; Jasper, 2012). On the other side, other contributions are more pessimistic: they discuss and denounce how differential “negative” emotional impacts of environmental conflicts, associated with neoliberal projects, extraction, violence, colonisation, etc. lead to human suffering, traumas, death, rupture of social fabric, etc. (Auyero and Swistun, 2009; Albrecht, 2011; Peluso and Watts, 2001; Sultana, 2011).

While my polarised analysis confronting optimistic and pessimistic may appear a bit forced, and of course the line separating those sides is neither clear nor precise, this division serves to identify and integrate some gaps that EmPEs need to address in order to advance the discussion about emotions, power and environmental conflict. First, and following “pessimists”, EmPEs still need to further consider the political relevance of emotions such as powerlessness, anger or trans-generational trauma as forms of engagement to conflictive territories. Especially in scenarios of violent struggles, EmPEs need to move beyond the emotional registers related to “loving or caring for nature” (Milton, 2002; Singh; 2013; Dallman et al., 2013; Nightingale, 2013), and advance research that takes into account emotions such as anger and sorrow and their role in environmental activisms. Still, political ecology studies of environmental conflicts need to further explore those “other” emotions present in environmental conflicts, incorporating also further decolonial ontologies and methodologies (Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999). Secondly, following “optimists”, EmPEs need to further reflect upon the political potential of “healing” (Middleton, 2010) under conditions of environmental transformation, mobilisation and conflict. That is, we need to further discuss ways in which activism facilitates emotional healing, transforming established emotional subjectivities (Middleton, 2010; Brown and Pickerill, 2009b), and how specific techniques such as arts, psychotherapy and pedagogy (Bondi, 2005a, 2014) can be useful for transforming political subjectivities in sites of conflicts.


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Acknowledging the political relevance that the contrast between “optimistic” and “pessimistic” provides inspires my proposed conceptual framework of EmPEs (see Figure II.3). While considering the interconnected dimensions of the role of emotions in environmental conflicts, I put forth a conceptual framework that explicitly consider emotions with relation to “the political”, specifically one that acknowledges how emotions can “foster” or “hinder” political subjectivities (vertical line in Figure II.3 indicates the axis that guides this discussion).

Figure II.3 Conceptual framework for EmPEs which considers several dimensions and ambivalent roles of emotions as regards power dynamics.

Emotions that hinder politisation of subjectivities and actions

Emotions that foster politisation of subjectivities and actions

The political

The geographical

The social

The more-than-human

The psychological

It is not that EmPEs need to choose among one or the other possibility, since, as Gramsci (see Nowell-Smith and Hoare, 1999) once famously said, we can be pessimistic because of intelligence, and optimistic because of will. That is, if we want EmPEs to explicitly discuss “the political”, we need to reflect upon how emotions foster or hinder the politicisation of subjectivities and actions in environmental conflicts, that is how they increase or decrease the possibilities of those “that do not count” to be counted, named, and recognised. Acknowledging both poles of the role that emotions have in the power dynamics of environmental conflicts opens the space to better understand, for example, the struggles and ambivalences of the subject (Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992; Butler; 1997), but also, how


30

and why some subjectivities come to reproduce hegemonic interests and others not, how struggles or negotiations in subjectivities take place and why and how political subjectivation happens in different ways. Of course, how different emotions unequally, intermittently and contradictorily can “foster” or “hinder” political subjectivities would also depend on the specific materialities and cultural characteristics of conflicts.

5. Conclusions: Contributions and Proposals for Future Research Agendas

My conceptual framework is not meant as a blueprint but as a framework that encompasses the dimensions I have identified as relevant for EmPEs. This framework situates the empirical chapters that follow, but can also serve as a guide for future studies of emotions in political ecology. However, it is important to point out here that Emotional Political Ecologies are now emerging and that they are far too broad and complex to fully map and limit different approaches to the analysis of the relationships between environmental conflict, power and emotion. Still, mapping general trends and gaps is a first step in identifying main contributions, weaknesses and possible future research agendas. Reviewing work in feminist political ecology, emotional geographies, social and cultural anthropology, social psychology and social movements theories has displayed the complexity and multiple dimensions that forge subjectivities in environmental conflicts. The psychological, the more-than-human, the geographical, the social and the political emerged as relevant and interconnected realms to be considered in order to understand how emotional subjectivities are framed in sites of environmental dispossession and struggles. I have also shown how researching emotions in environmental conflicts could further analyse “the political” that is at stake in grassroots struggles for the environment. The contradictions between work that emphasises “positive”, engaged emotions towards nature as fuel for political creativity on the one hand, and work denouncing the negative emotional impacts of environmental conflicts on the other hand, need to be considered. To this end, I have proposed a conceptual framework for EmPEs that enquires and analyses how emotions foster and hinder the politicisation of subjectivities and actions in environmental conflicts. I argue that those two apparently contradictory trends come into a fertile conversation through EmPEs that engage with the political relevance of negative emotions as well as political ecologies of healing.

Moreover, this chapter has also pointed to possible future research agendas in EmPEs, although they have not been discussed in detail here. My review highlights two research gaps: the role of emotions in normative and imposed subject-making processes, and the need for methodological diversification. First, EmPEs should further explore how capitalism, extractivism, consumption and accumulation are emotional projects too (Konings, 2015) where the dynamics of the capitalist economy need to produce new sources of faith and enchantment, and nature/environmental issues are not an exception. Thrift has already drawn attention to how states may use affective “contagion” to control emotions and establish political and moral authorities, using bodies as unconscious or semi-conscious receivers and transmitters of knowledge and feeling


31

(Pain, 2009: 478). However, this line of research still needs to be further explored, analysing for example how the affective “ins and outs” of alternative environmental agendas feed market rationality, or further studying the ways in which subjects engage emotionally in practices of environmental degradation.

Second, EmPEs still need to further explore methodologies that can better grasp the multiple dimensions that intermesh in the emotional life of environmental conflicts. The creativity of action-research methodologies used in political ecology studies could be complemented with methodologies inspired by indigenous and peasant rituals, healing therapies, performances, arts, etc. This inter-disciplinarity, or better, un-disciplinarity15 could enrich both research and action in environmental conflicts, while also enabling EmPEs to further engage “the body” and “the unconscious”, usually under-explored (as in emotional and affectual geographies, Pile, 2010). In that sense, and similarly to what Bondi (2005a, 2014) has done for human geography, political ecology needs to consider if and how psychotherapeutic theory and practice can shed light on how relationships between power, conflict and emotions develop in and influence environmental conflicts.

In light of the diversity of the work here reviewed and the recent emergence of scholars interested in researching the relationships between emotion, environmental conflict and power, it is evident that EmPEs can support and contribute to the work of a vast diversity of scholars who have already struggled to insert emotion in the academic sphere. As Sultana (2015) points out, there are several ways in which EmPEs could be further elaborated: considering diversity of emotions and resources, analysing the conflicts and negotiations regarding the intimate, relational, collective or social character of emotions. The list could be as long as creative political ecologists can be. For political ecology however, the point is how to do this in sites of inequality, environmental suffering and hope, and in ways that contribute towards the political/epistemological engagement “in favour of vulnerable people” (Forsyth, 2008: 762). Pursuing this foresees an inspiring research and action agenda for the establishment of EmPEs.

15. See Undisciplined Environments, International Conference of the European Network of Political Ecology, http://www.ces.uc.pt/undisciplined-environments/ [Last accessed 07.02.2017].

33

III. METHODOLOGY

Don’t tell me not to cry. To calm it down

Not to be so extreme To be reasonable.

I am an emotional creature. It’s how the earth got made.

How the wind continues to pollinate. You don’t tell the Atlantic Ocean

to behave.

I am an emotional creature. Why would you want to shut me down

or turn me off?

(…)

I love that I can feel the inside of the feelings in you,

even if it stops my life even if it hurts too much

or takes me off track even if it breaks my heart.

It makes me responsible. I am an emotional

I am an emotional, devotional, incantational, creature.

Eve Ensler

34


35

1. Introduction

The previous chapter set the theoretical framework that introduces the empirical studies of this thesis. The general Research Question What role do emotions play in the politics of environmental conflicts? led me to find two main gaps in the literature, which I will explore empirically in the forthcoming chapters: first, about the role of negative emotions in fostering or hindering political subjectivation and action in environmental conflicts; second, about how specific interventions such as psychotherapy can be useful for transforming political subjectivities in sites of conflicts. In this chapter, I explain precisely how I unpack these interrelated questions when doing fieldwork, adapting established political ecology research strategies – case study method with an emphasis on ethnographic methods – to be able to grasp the relationships between emotion, power and environmental conflict.

In elaborating these ideas, this chapter makes explicit how I sought to operationalise my research question and subquestions in the field. Apprehending the emotional experience of peoples involved in environmental conflicts and the broader dynamics in which they are embedded required conducting research in specific places and engaging with a range of people during sustained periods of time. In Section 2 I justify why southern Chile was selected as a case study, as well as how and why I decided to engage with the indigenous Mapuche populations and their territorial mobilisations. I also explain why I decided to complement my research with a case study from southern Mexico, where I engaged the work of a local NGO developing psychotherapeutic workshops for local indigenous leaders. Section 3 explains the methods used and Section 4 details my epistemology (research philosophy and approach), as well as key points to my positionality and ethical considerations.

2. Case Study Strategy and Site Selection

Table III.1 presents and outlines the corresponding study focus, methods deployed and means of data collection for the two distinct case studies, which comprise the empirical evidence of this thesis.

III. Methodology

36

Tabl

e III

.1. R

esea

rch

Stra

tegy

and

cor

resp

ondi

ng m

etho

ds a

ddre

ssin

g re

sear

ch q

uest

ions

Rese

arch

Que

stio

n(s)

How

and

why

em

otio

ns

such

as a

nger

, sor

row

and

pa

in sh

ape

envi

ronm

enta

l gr

assr

oots

’ sub

ject

iviti

es

and

mob

ilisa

tion?

How

do

stat

e an

d pr

ivat

e se

ctor

ent

ities

(e

.g., v

ia p

olic

ies a

nd

prac

tices

) try

to p

reve

nt

thos

e em

otio

ns in

the

cont

ext o

f env

ironm

enta

l co

nflic

ts?

Can

psy

chot

hera

peut

ic

prac

tice

help

act

ivist

s’ pr

oces

ses o

f pol

itica

l su

bjec

tivisa

tion

in

envi

ronm

enta

l con

flict

s, an

d, if

yes

, how

?

Stud

y Fo

cus

Fiel

d re

sear

ch o

n co

nflic

t ar

ound

tree

pla

ntat

ions

to

iden

tify

the

role

of “

nega

tive”

em

otio

ns in

rela

tion

to

subj

ectiv

ities

in e

nviro

nmen

tal

confl

icts

. Spe

cific

ally,

rese

arch

on

the

way

s sta

te a

nd

fore

stry

ent

erpr

ises d

evel

op

subj

ect-

mak

ing

cam

paig

ns;

loca

l rea

ctio

ns to

thos

e an

d pr

actic

es o

f Map

uche

“in

resis

tanc

e” c

omm

uniti

es

(Ara

uco,

Chi

le)

Ana

lysis

of t

he w

ork

of E

dupa

z, a

loca

l NG

O in

Chi

apas

, w

hich

dev

elop

s Ges

talt

psyc

hoth

erap

y w

orks

hops

fo

r ind

igen

ous a

nd p

easa

nt

activ

ists (

Chi

apas

, Méx

ico)

Met

hod

In-d

epth

cas

e st

udy

In-d

epth

cas

e st

udy

Dat

a co

llect

ion

Exte

nsiv

e fie

ldw

ork

with

diff

eren

t pha

ses

durin

g th

ree

year

s. D

irect

obs

erva

tion

and

ethn

ogra

phy.

Fort

y-th

ree

sem

i-str

uctu

red

inte

rvie

ws,

anal

ysis

of

offici

al d

ocum

ents

and

se

cond

ary

data

Two

mon

ths o

f Pa

rtic

ipan

t Obs

erva

tion

of th

e w

ork

of E

dupa

z. Tw

enty

-thr

ee se

mi-

stru

ctur

ed in

terv

iew

s and

th

ree

“per

form

ativ

e” fo

cus

grou

ps

Out

put

Cha

pter

IVA

rtic

le p

ublis

hed

in

Geo

foru

m

Cha

pter

VA

rtic

le p

ublis

hed

in

Emot

ion,

Spa

ce a

nd

Socie

ty


37

Political ecologists use the case study research strategy to analyse the “why” and “how” of power relationships related to the environment (see Peet and Watts, 2004; Robbins, 2012a; Rocheleau et al., 1996). Research through case study strategies allows political ecologists to retain a holistic and meaningful interpretation of the characteristics of real life events, while also allowing generalisations of theoretical and analytical propositions (Yin, 2003). Moreover, engaging in case studies offers a productive way to explore, communicate and practice research that considers environmental conflicts as emotional conflicts. As several feminist and emotional geographers have shown (see Sultana, 2011; Davidson et al., 2005; Nightingale, 2011b), engaging in the research of concrete socionatures and struggles sheds a light beyond apparent “ritual academic blind alleys” (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 223) that tend to leave emotions “apart” when analysing and engaging with environmental conflicts. In that sense, case study strategies are relevant for the development of EmPEs, since they enable “a nuanced view of reality … [where] concrete experiences can be achieved via continued proximity to the studied reality and via feedback from those under study” (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 22).

Nevertheless, even if deciding to conduct research through concrete case studies, there is neither a unique nor an automatic way to deploy an emotional political ecology research strategy; the different research processes related to the two case studies in this thesis show this. My two empirical cases not only respond to different subquestions that emerge from this thesis’s main enquiry, but also developed differently on the ground: extensive in space and time and more grounded in the first case (Chapter IV), intensive and more research-question oriented in the second (Chapter V). Before discussing the different nature of the research conducted, I shall now introduce the concrete sites where I developed my research.

2.1 Site Selection

Fieldwork for this thesis was developed in two sites in Latin America: firstly in southern Chile and secondly in southern Mexico (Chiapas). The critical lens of political ecology proved useful for understanding socio-environmental dynamics in Latin America (see Perreault, 2015; Alimonda, 2006; Leff, 2012; Bustos-Gallardo et al., 2015; Andreucci and Radhuber, 2015; Andreucci and Kallis, 2017), given the trend of increasing extractivism, violence, degradation and developmentalisation of the region (Ulloa, 2015; Svampa, 2013; Gudynas, 2009), as well as the mobilisation of local, national and regional movements in response to these phenomena (Carruthers, 2008; Martínez-Alier, 2002; Delgado, 2013). In such a context, focusing on the triad of emotion–power–conflict can help political ecologists specifically interested in Latin America to more subtlety understand how hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ideas and practices regarding regional environmental issues circulate and are subjectivised.

In searching for answers to my research question, both cases analysed in this thesis share, generally speaking, relevant characteristics: (i) they involve sites of historical and contemporary environmental, resource-based and territorial processes of dispossession, which allow and call

III. Methodology

38

for a critical consideration of the power-laden struggles over the environment; and (ii) they are sites of internationally well-known, indigenous Mapuche and Zapatista communities, which are inspiring examples to reflect upon the process of constituting subjectivities in communitarian and political mobilisation. Although my research interest was not, a priori, to centre my analysis on those (Mapuche and Zapatistas) communities, there were unavoidably political processes to be considered, since they have both challenged, locally and globally, existing power relations and facilitated processes of political subjectivation of the dispossessed, indigenous, peasant communities (Vergara-Camus, 2009).

As I explain in detail in subsequent chapters (see Section 3 in Chapters IV and V), my research in southern Chile engaged with a conflict over tree plantations, where drawing out evidence of state and private practices for fire control revealed the strategic use of emotions in the protection of forestry extraction. Also, evidence from political and spiritual Mapuche gatherings allowed me to reflect on the role of negative emotions for the process of subject-making, and thus contrasting with a tendency of political ecologists to emphasise positive, loving, caring engagements with nature when analysing activists’ subjectivities in environmental conflicts. The idea to develop another case study in Chiapas (Mexico) arose while I was developing my research in Chile and after I discovered that there was a local NGO, Edupaz, developing emotional workshops, based in Gestalt therapy, with indigenous and communitarian leaders. Edupaz was unique in explicitly seeking to support local communities in economic, environmental and emotional terms, and moreover by using a Gestalt psychotherapeutic framework to deal with the emotional (combined with Maya spirituality) – an uncommon approach in community psychology. I therefore decided to complement my research with this second case study and search for relevant evidence to better answer my research questions and address the research gaps identified.

The concrete cases selected adjusted well to the formerly presented conceptual framework in the way they let me explore the five dimensions of emotions (the psychological, the more-than-human, the social, the geographical, and the political) and the two political poles (emotions hindering and fostering political subjectivation and action) identified. My work, taken as a whole and in a grounded fashion, connects all of them; however, in the concrete cases where I developed my research, some of the dimensions appeared more relevant than others. My analysis of the conflict around tree plantations in Chile (Chapter IV) emphasises the relevant role that the more-than-human, the social, the geographical and the political have for different actors in the conflicts. That is, this chapter shows how these dimensions are differently mobilised in the strategies deployed by state entities, forestry enterprises and local peasant and indigenous communities in the conflict. My empirical research in Mexico (Chapter V) highlights the interrelationships between the psychological, the social and the political in relation to emotions in environmental conflicts, dimensions that were emphasised in Edupaz’s psychotherapeutic interventions in southern Chiapas. This suggests that the formerly presented


39

multi-dimensional framework needs to adapt to the concrete contexts where research is developed: different dimensions may have more or less weight according to concrete contexts. I summarise how the two empirical chapters explore the different dimensions outlined in the previous theoretical framework in figure III.1.

Figure III.1 Empirical chapters consider the different dimensions for the study of emotions in environmental conflicts



CHAPTER IV

The political

The geographical

The social

The more-than-human

The psychological



CHAPTER V

3. Methods

Concrete methods for getting data were based on varied sources of evidence, which enabled me not only to access different types of information but also to triangulate that information. I used a combination of qualitative research techniques where participant observation, semi-structured interviews and focus groups were my main sources of primary data; document reviews offered secondary data and my fieldwork diary served as a reflection upon all the data and information I was in contact with. I illustrate the interaction of my different research methods in Figure III.2.

The political

The geographical

The social

The more-than-human

The psychological

III. Methodology

40

Figure III.2 Interaction of the different research methods used in my research strategy

Document Review

Direct and Participant Observation

Fieldwork diary

Focus groupsSemi-structured Interviews

Secondary data

Primary data

Reflexing on data

For a variety of reasons – not previously knowing the cases, time constrains and the inability to stay for long periods of time in the field due to the demands of the project that funded my scholarship – my research was not developed as an action or participatory research framework, although my research strategy is informed by them. This means that I did my best to adapt my methods and the communication of my results towards the aims and interests of local communities. Table III.2 sums up the different forms in which the two case studies mobilised qualitative research methods in diverse ways.

Table III.2. Research strategy and methods developed for each case study

Research strategy and methods

Time/duration

Document review

Semi-structured interviews

Direct and participant observation

Focus group

Devolution or communication of research result to communities

Fieldwork diary

Data analysis

Case study in Chile

Extended fieldwork with different phases during 3 years (May 2013–January 2016)

Extensive

Yes, to different social actors in the conflict

Yes

No

Constant

Yes

Generation of codes and themes and discourse analysis à la Foucault

Case study in Mexico

Concentrated fieldwork (August–October 2015)

Focused, selective

Yes, but only to NGO members and participants of workshops

Yes

Yes, performative focus groups

Occasional

Yes

Generation of codes and themes


41

As Table III.2 shows, there is a considerable difference in the time dedicated towards different cases. Since I lived in Santiago, Chile, for approximately three years, I travelled on several occasions al Sur (to the South), which not only incrementally broadened my knowledge of the conflict, but helped me establish a diverse range of contacts and build mutual confidence with local activists and Mapuche communities. This time-extensive research strategy enabled a better grasp of the conflict in a grounded fashion, that is, from the point of view of the actors and how they process it (Glaser, 1992). The strategy also implied a progressive identification and integration of field experiences into my theoretical framework and questions. Differently, my stay in Chiapas was much more focused, where my understanding of the conflict was in-depth but more narrowly defined to my specific research interests and questions, and my engagement came through a defined collaboration with Edupaz, agreed upon beforehand via email and Skype.

In what follows, I briefly describe how I mobilised the different methods in ways that contributed to my understanding of the operation of power in the concrete environmental conflicts analysed. In describing my methods, I explain and make explicit how I captured the emotional, given the challenge that researching emotions implies since they tend to be considered as ungraspable or unknowable (Sturdy, 2003). Nevertheless – and it must be obvious by now – my research is not a positivist study of quantifiable emotions, but understands emotions as “discursive, dialogical phenomena, structured and influenced by the historical and cultural contingencies of communicational interactions” (Greco and Stenner, 2013: 9), while also being attentive to non-representational feelings (Thrift, 2008), that is to say, corporeal movements, silences and “emotional aromas” that can be brought as raw data to be interpreted jointly with informants16.

• Document review provided grounding in the political and economic dynamics related to the environmental conflicts of both cases at different scales (national, regional, local). In the case of Chile, I regularly collected local, national and international press articles on the conflict around tree plantations in the southern regions. Those conflicts are part of what is internationally known as “the Mapuche conflict”, which involves disputes with forestry companies and big landowners over resources such as land and forests and access rights to the sea and rivers. I also analysed reports provided by private forestry enterprises, research institutions and public institutions such as CONAF (the National Forestry Corporation). Data also included statistics related to the evolution of the forestry sector. Since I used fire as an entry point to examine the way in which private forestry companies and the state frame their relationships with people who live at the margins of tree plantations, I also gathered information on how fires affect tree plantations and strategies deployed to deal with fires. Information also included secondary sources such as books on the political history of Chile

16. This happened, for example, when either during individual interviews or collective activities I shared impressions such as “It seems this makes you sad” or “Everybody was suddenly silent”. Sharing those reflexions sometimes inspired conversations where people could explain to me how or why they understood the “data” I was laying on the table.

III. Methodology

42

and more concretely about southern Chile – specifically related to territorial struggles during colonisation (1598–1810), independence (1810), the more recent “Chilean way to socialism” (1970–73) and the consolidation of neoliberal regimes (1973 onwards). In the case of Mexico, my collection of secondary data was more limited in time and standpoint. I collected enough information to understand the recent history of peasant and indigenous struggles for land (especially after the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994) via the national press and reports generated by civil society organisations.

• Semi-structured interviews constitute the core empirical material of this thesis, with a total of 66 semi-structured interviews: 43 in Chile and 23 in Mexico. Semi-structured interviews lasted on average for 90 minutes, following an interview guide that I elaborated as a general script and list of topics, but were flexible and open-ended. In Chile, due to time-extensive participant observations in the field, interviews with certain peasant and indigenous communities were a mixture of conversation, walks in and around the territories and sharing communitarian and household activities. In Mexico, as I explain in Chapter V, my interviews sought more explicitly for rapport, facilitating the self-exploration and self-reflection of the interviewees around my questions (inspired by psychotherapeutic methods, see Bondi, 2014). In both cases, some interviews facilitated a relational “emotional reflexivity” (Spencer, 2011) between my conversational partners and myself. In the case of Chile, I also conducted interviews with informants from public and private institutions, which helped me understand the conflict “from the other side” (state and private sector). These interviews were more spatially and temporally limited (in an office), and less interactive. More information on the general structure of interviews for both cases can be found in Annexes 1 and 2.

• Direct and Participant observation enabled the obtaining of insights about what people do (practice), what they say (meaning) and what they feel, remember and imagine (emotion) in their everyday contexts. I participated in a wide range of activities: (a) private sector “social responsibility” activities with local communities in Chile, (b) daily life of and selected political rituals of the Mapuche in the middle of tree plantations in southern Chile, and (c) daily work of a local NGO in southern Mexico. All these allowed me to witness the subtleties, complexity and interconnectedness of the social world of different actors in the conflict. These experiences were possible thanks to diverse circumstances: ØWitnessing private sector social responsibility activities in Chile was relatively

straightforward. After my interviews, many officials from forestry enterprises were happy to show me their educational and social strategies when approaching local communities, since from their point of view those constituted communicational and intervention improvements in the context of social responsibility programmes and forestry certifications such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).


43

ØObserving and participating in the daily life and political rituals of the Mapuche in the middle of tree plantations in southern Chile was possible due to the extended nature of my research there, which enabled me to collaborate and generate mutual confidence with local communities. With one of those communities especially (who remain anonymous due to ethical questions), I generated a collaboration that came closer to militant research (Bookchin et al., 2013), where I helped in whatever was necessary – writing statements, setting stages for rituals or communitarian meals, documenting via photography and dissemination activities, translating information about other environmental conflicts in English.

ØObserving the daily work of a local NGO in Mexico was possible since Edupaz was willing to develop a systematisation of their organisation of Gestalt Therapy workshops over a ten-year period (2004–14), a project I helped them advance. In that sense, my research was well suited with their necessities at that moment.

• Focus groups. In both Chile and Mexico, several individual interviews with members of local communities usually transformed into unplanned, spontaneous and loosely structured focus group exercises, since members of the family or the community dropped in and participated in the conversation. Those constituted very interesting sources of data to reflect upon inter-subjectivity processes in different spheres, moving in between the private and public, the individual and collective. Although not originally planned as a research method for my case study in Mexico, I co-organised three “performative focus groups” with interviewees I already knew in southern Chiapas. As I discuss in Chapter V, this was a good exercise to access the emotional beyond discourse, since I included corporal movement and meditation in the groups (See Annex 2 for the general proposed programme of those groups).

• While in the field, I maintained a fieldwork diary in order to take systematic notes describing things like fieldwork situations, unrecorded interviews and talks. This diary was also especially relevant in facilitating my “emotional reflexivity” (Spencer, 2011), that is, to acknowledge and identify my own emotions as inseparable experiences from my research, as driving forces of both engagement and paralysis (Hubbard et al., 2001; Oliver-Frauca, 2007). Although in this thesis I do not include my own emotions as part of the empirical material, reflexivity over my own emotions while doing research proved crucial for improving awareness of my embodied and emotional motivations and positionality17, as well as for contextualising how my life experiences acted as a lens in negotiating emotions while being in the field (Harding, 1991). Identifying my own emotions in the field was

17. See Annex 3, which shows a blog post I published based on my fieldwork diary, regarding my emotions while doing research in February 2014 in southern Chile. In it I invite political ecologists to consider their emotions as part of the process of doing and engaging with their research.

III. Methodology

44

useful in trying to avoid counter transference (projecting my own emotions on others)18. Keeping this emotional fieldwork diary also helped me to have a place to process this emotional material in a way that my own emotions had a place within my research but without occupying too much of it; that is, using the diary helped me escape from the “egotrip” that focusing on my own emotions as a researcher could impose on the work, since my own emotions were not the object of study (see Harvey and Haraway’s debate on situated knowledges, 1995: 508).

• Data analysis. After transcribing interviews, focus group talks and fieldwork notes, I examined my data using qualitative content analysis, as described by Bryman (2004). Data analysis was done by combining inductive and deductive research approaches that enabled a constant reflection and an iterative learning process: (1) Deductive analysis, using literature review and research questions as entry points for analysis, which provided a set of predefined codes; and (2) Inductive analysis, close reading of evidence through which to identify new concepts or issues, which generated new codes grounded in the data. I illustrate the general research process of this thesis in Figure III.2, based on the wheel metaphor (Rudestam and Newton, 2014). Successive approximation involved an iterative process of moving from the research questions and conceptual framework to probe the data I collected, and vice versa; I thus sought to move “from vague ideas and concrete details in the data toward a comprehensive analysis with generalisations” (Newmann, 2007: 337).

18. An example of how I tried to avoid counter transference in my research is the following: At the beginning of my fieldwork in southern Chile, I felt, at several moments, fear. I felt fear of isolation when I was first invited to attend an indigenous meeting where more than 300 Mapuche–Lafkenche leaders met, when activists suggested that my telephone will probably be tapped by Carabineros now that I was in contact with them or when the family of the lodging where I stayed shared with me some usual “black magic” practices people used locally to protect their families and territories from others. Reflecting and acknowledging some of those fears helped me better understand and empathise with the locals’ expressions of fear by the violence due to the conflict. But it was also important to contextualise some of those feelings as related to my own life experiences, in order not to amplify or directly associate the expression of fear of others as my own feelings. For example, through my writing I understood that in my feelings of fear other experiences intermingled, such as those related to women’s experiences of insecurity and vulnerability when doing fieldwork and to the academic demands to produce “interesting enough” arguments (see Oliver-Frauca, 2007).


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Figure III.3 Research analytical approach based on the research wheel metaphor (Rudestam and Newton, 2014)

New literature to consider

Conceptualframework

Initial Research Motivations; Propostions

and Empirical observation

Data collection

Contributions,Main arguments

Gaps, Research

Questions, Hypothesis

New Hypothesis

Data analysis

New propositons

INDUCTIVE

DEDUCTIVE

I came to the field with certain concepts, related to my themes of interest, such as the politics of discipline and governmentality, activism and emotions. These concepts shaped the questions I asked my interviewees, under codes such as “disciplined subjectivities”, “mobilisation and empowerment” and “emotions”. As I found those codes when analysing my empirical evidence, I sought to summarise key findings and insights, illustrating how pieces of evidence explained or related to those codes. While I coded interviews and field notes, new topics and codes emerged, for example, the relevance of sovereignty, negative emotions, reflexivity and indigenous spirituality in local activisms. These pointed to key themes that I had not considered beforehand but which were important to give greater insight into the theoretical framing of my research. Summarising how empirical evidence illustrated the relationship between these “new” grounded codes and my first more deductive codes helped me move towards more general themes and then to narratives and results and contributions for each empirical chapter.

In my research in Chile, analytical codes emerged in an iterative process for two years, where momentary ideas and topics were nuanced with new empirical material and fieldwork experiences; whereas in Mexico, the research wheel had a faster “spin”. Also, in the case of Chile, I relied on a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine, 2008) for uncovering the workings of power/knowledge in the narratives and practices of interviewees.

III. Methodology

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• Devolution or communication of research results to communities. Being based in Chile for three years facilitated a much more in-depth engagement with the case and the local communities. This implied not only that my research in Chile was more “grounded”, as I have already explained, but facilitated different forms of communicating my research results: blog posts, articles in local media, reports and public talks (see Annex 4). On the hand, my research in Mexico was much more focused, based mainly on my stay with Edupaz. I elaborated a report (in Spanish) for them, based on my analysis, which I sent via email in December 2015 and I was able to discuss my results personally with them and some interviewees in February 2016.

4. Epistemology, Positionality and Ethics

My research strategy is contextualised in the theoretical, methodological and political commitments usual in political ecology studies: “a theoretical commitment to critical social theory and a post-positivist understanding of nature and the production of knowledge about it, which views these as inseparable from social relations of power;… a methodological commitment to in-depth, direct observation involving qualitative research of some sort, often in combination with quantitative methods and/or document analysis;… [and] a normative political commitment to social justice and structural political change. Political ecology is an explicitly normative intellectual project, which has from its beginning highlighted the struggles, interests, and plight of marginalized populations” (Perreault et al., 2015: 7–8, italics in the original).

When approaching the triad of emotion–conflict–power that I have set as central to my study, this political ecology epistemology implied two things. First, the acknowledgement that the relationships I tried to understand are embedded historically and materially by specific political, social, economic and cultural structures (Castree, 2005). This required a historical look at the political dynamics in the sites of conflict in order to grasp how the more structural factors and the lived, micro-experiences were intimately interrelated. Second, political ecology’s political commitment also implied that my approach tried not only to analyse the aforementioned triad, but also to consider how this discussion could be somehow fruitful for the communities and movements facing environmental struggles.

The epistemological groundings of political ecology and feminist political ecology (see Harcourt and Nelson, 2015) guided my reflections about my position in relation to my research, the conflict and the people I was in contact with. In terms of my research approach, before “going in the field” I critically reflected upon my research project as an imperialist and colonialist project (Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999), as well as on the difficulty of working in places where I had no initial knowledge or attachment, and that are pierced by violence and dispossession. Being in the field gave me constant lessons and new ways of locating myself, being aware of my own position of privilege (England, 1994) and my responsibility to critical inquiry. This explicit understanding of my positionality fed into my research by maintaining a critical introspection


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about myself as a researcher and the impact of my research process, recognising also how my research foregrounds some interpretations and silences others (Jackson, 2006) and seeking to avoid the “danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions” (Haraway, 1988: 583–84).

Nevertheless, and in spite of my preparation before going into the field, the fieldwork itself set its own challenges and lessons. Presenting myself as a European PhD student opened the doors of (some) private and state institutions in Chile, for interviewing them and accessing secondary data, although of course I faced blockades to the access of information – for example, rejection to facilitate financial data I asked for or refusing to concede to interviews. Regarding my relationship with indigenous and peasant communities, I interviewed or shared spaces with several communities in southern Chile, but only with some of them did I build a relationship of mutual trust, where having time to know each other and discuss our interests little by little was crucial. In both cases, in southern Chile and southern Mexico, conviviality with my interviewees was essential for both sides to build trust in the other. Understandably, there were moments when I felt unwelcome or looked at with suspicion; those feelings also fed my reflections about my role as a researcher and how I could contribute further to the process I was taking part in. Based on my own politics of solidarity, I did my best to make contributions to the movements with which I engaged during my project. This, for example, is one of the reasons that guided my work during the secondment in the project that funded my research, where I decided to research the impacts of tree plantations towards water availability in southern Chile, since local communities repeatedly commented on this topic as one of their main worries (see González-Hidalgo, 2015). That is, in some cases, my reciprocity went beyond my research interests, and doing this helped me expand my expertise and my understanding of what is at stake in the conflicts. In southern Chile I distributed several dissemination-type articles (see Annex 4) in English and Spanish in order to support the circulation of critical and engaged perspectives towards the conflict around tree plantations in the region.

Finally, on a more procedural dimension of ethics, developing research in sites of violent conflicts required some basic proceedings, such as being sure that I could ensure that participants could maintain their anonymity19. All methods (participant observation, ethnography, interviews and focus groups) follow EU recommendations regarding ethics, as stated in the Guidance Note for Researchers and Evaluators of Social Sciences and Humanities Research20.

19. The case study in Chile implies sensitive information since research was conducted in areas where some communities are in direct conflict with state or forestry enterprises. In Chile, all my interviewees received a document stating “informed consent” (whose contents were also explained by myself) where the aim of my research, contacts, hosting institution, etc., was explained. All participants were given the option to formalise it with a signature. Interviewees that agreed to be recorded signed the consent form. For the other interviewees and/or groups where I developed ethnography and/or participant observation (in Chile and in Mexico) consent was given orally, in the presence of witnesses or in collective meetings. In my writing, interviewees remain anonymous.

20. See EU Research and Innovation Participant Portal, http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/funding/reference_docs.html [Last access 20.05. 2017]

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Arauco tiene una pena que no la puedo callar son injusticias de siglos que todos ven aplicar,

nadie le ha puesto remedio pudiéndolo remediar.

Levántate Huenchullán.

Arauco has a sorrowthat I cannot silenceCenturies of injustice

that everybody has witnessednobody put an end to them

even when they could be solved.Stand up Huenchullán.

Violeta Parra

IV. HOW SOVEREIGNTY CLAIMS AND “NEGATIVE” EMOTIONS INFLUENCE THE PROCESS OF SUBJECT-MAKING: EVIDENCE FROM A CASE OF CONFLICT OVER TREE PLANTATIONS IN SOUTHERN CHILE.

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1. Introduction

Walking between large extensions of pine and eucalyptus plantations in southern Chile, one cannot but be overwhelmed by the apparent success of the forestry extractivist project. Today, tree plantations cover almost three million hectares in central and southern Chile (CONAF, 2011), guaranteeing an efficient production of forest raw materials at high growth rates to supply national and international markets (Cossalter and Pye-smith, 2003). However, the more vulnerable face of this model reveals itself every summer, when thousands of fires affect forestry company plots. Fire, like other socio-ecological constraints (water availability, soil fertility, etc.) endangers the order and efficiency upon which forestry extraction rests. But, less visibly, fires also imply that the neighbours of corporate plots – that is, rural, semi-rural, peasant and indigenous communities surrounded by extensive, capital productive and flammable tree plantations – become key actors in managing the efficiency-vulnerability equilibrium of tree plantations.

Power dynamics related to tree plantations have been studied as conflicts between states, private capital and local populations. Smallholders tend to play a leading role in those conflicts that result from plantations’ large-scale land occupation, which implies power concentration, displacements and adverse impacts on local livelihoods (Carrere and Lohmann, 1996; Gerber, 2011). While some analysts acknowledge the broad repertoire of practices of resistance, depending on the political and socio-cultural contexts where those struggles take place (Peluso, 1992; Scott, 1985), conflicts around tree plantations are usually defined as “physical mobilisations coming from neighbouring populations and targeted at the perceived negative effects of the plantation” (Gerber, 2011: 166, my italics). The emphasis on the “physical” is consistent with a prevailing tendency in political ecology to study how ecological distribution conflicts develop in public arenas (Martínez-Alier, 2002) overlooking what happens in subjective spheres. Such focus misses how resistance is experienced on a day-to-day basis conjointly in bodies, minds and emotions, and how oppositional reactions blur with consent and negotiation tactics, thus providing a “fairly standard script” about “how people actually respond, change their behaviors, or alter the landscape” (Robbins, 2012a: 208-210).

Subjectivation, or subject-making processes, can take place in the course of tree plantation conflicts. Lots of ink has been spilled to discuss whether subjects exist as separate entities and the limits of their capacity to have agency (Foucault, 1979; Butler, 1997; Allen, 2002; Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992). Here, I do not delve into depth on that issue but I do take it as a starting point to understand processes that form subjects. I use a fairly basic notion of subjectivation or subject-making as the political process of forming (or constructing) individual and collective subjectivities. By political, I mean processes in which diverse mechanisms of power and authority (e.g., agenda-setting, governmentality, violence, etc.) and how responses to those mechanisms operate. Focussing on how exactly subject-making develops is important for understanding not only “disciplined subjectivities” or how people are continuously formed by and brought into relations

IV. Case Study in Chile

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of power (Foucault, 1979; Lemke, 2001), but also how they reflect, act and embody resistance, the process that Rancière (1992) calls political subjectivation. Some scholars have explored this gap by analysing how subjectivities and emotions are arenas of socio-ecological struggles together with “physical” landscapes (Nightingale, 2011a; Singh, 2013; Sultana, 2011), especially through the lens of feminist political ecology (Elmhirst, 2011). However, the study of environmental subjects in the context of conflict – especially conflicts related to forestry extractivism – instead of conservation governance (Agrawal, 2005; Singh, 2013), is still underdeveloped.

In this chapter, I use fire as an entry point to examine the way in which private forestry companies and the state frame their relationships with people who live at the margins of tree plantations in southern Chile. Focusing on fire prevention technologies, I examine how these try to establish discipline through transforming locals into “good neighbours” in order to ensure land control, minimise conflict and protect the capital accumulation process that occurs through forestry extraction. I also look at how individuals and communities get in the way of this project and in doing so engage with processes of political subjectivation, and the relevance of “negative” emotions in this process. In political ecology, forests have been analysed separately as either stages for conflict or as settings where processes of subject-formation take place, as I explain in Section 2; this disconnection between those two literatures is the conceptual motivation for this chapter. Section 3 describes my methods and case study site. Sections 4 and 5 identify the key strategies used by state and private companies in Chile for “accumulating through disciplining”, and I use fire control as an example to illustrate how those strategies operate. Sections 6 and 7 analyse local reactions to this project. Section 8 discusses my findings, and concludes, with reference to forestry conflicts, subjectivity and emotional geographies literatures.

2. Into the Woods: Land Control, Conflict and Subjectivities

Tree plantations are forests designed by humans for the sake of profitability and efficiency maximisation, monocultures for the production of raw materials at high growth rates, organised to supply wood, charcoal, logs and pulp to markets (Carrere and Lohmann, 1996; Pryor, 1982). Property concentration is a key institution of power in relation to tree plantations (Gerber and Veuthey, 2010), since it facilitates the dispossession of local populations and the realisation of a capitalist-oriented economic potential of resources via credits, subsidies, industrialisation and proletarianisation of labour (Bull et al., 2006). As happens with many forestry projects (Scott, 1985; Vandergeest and Peluso, 2006), knowledge, values and discourses are also crucial in ensuring and protecting tree plantation projects: “green washing” of forestry activities like the Forest Stewardship Council (Bloomfield, 2012) and the criminalisation and violence towards protest against forestry (Gerber, 2011) have been reported as land control mechanisms used to establish and expand monoculture forestry activities.


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The operation of those power mechanisms transforms suburban, peasant and indigenous communities’ territories into industrial, extractivist landscapes (Bridge and McManus, 2000). Processes of land control also occur via subject-formation, whereby institutions of state and capital and NGOs deploy disciplinary systems through de-centralised forest governance (Agrawal, 2005), property enclosure (Malhi, 2011), or by defining what knowledge and behaviour is appropriate for environmental conservation (Bryant, 2002). Control of land and subjectivities takes place when technologies of state or market power transform into “technologies of the self” (Lemke, 2001). One such technology is “individual responsabilisation” through which subjects themselves incorporate and assume the individual responsibility of implementing disciplinary mechanisms (Foucault, 1979; Agrawal, 2005; Coaffee, 2013) by internalising hegemonic logics through acting and thinking as forest stewards, peaceful indigenous subjects or by abandoning customary forms of organising livelihoods that hinder commercialised forestry. The focus on individual responsibility empties the political and power relationships of forest governance, shifting attention from broader processes of dispossession to concrete individuals or groups as responsible for causing environmental degradation (González-Hidalgo et al., 2014). For example, Du Monceau (2008) shows how tree plantations in Chile transform subjects by creating an “extractive mentality”, which is adopted by several peasant and indigenous communities who become small land holding forestry entrepreneurs.

Nevertheless, disciplinary tactics are not always successful: conflict emerges when locals refuse to accept what is expected from them and express disapproval to elite, state or colonial policies, cultures and ideologies over their livelihoods (Scott, 1985; Peluso, 1992). In his review of tree plantation conflicts, Gerber (2011) explains how those conflicts are expressed by means of lawsuits and demonstrations, side-by-side with “weapons of the weak” (Scott, 1985) which can include arson attacks, stealing company property, material damages and blockades to the industrial forestry activity. However, when considering subject formation, this rupture (Rancière, 2001) or counter-conduct21 (Cadman, 2010) is not automatic, spontaneous or easy. It demands that local communities go through a process of both political de-subjectivation of the imposed social order, and re-subjectivation in order to resist the others’ “givenness of place” both in terms of identity and spatial relations (Dikeç, 2012). This process of political subjectivation can take place through collective processes of expression of dissent and the “reconfiguration of the field of experience” (Rancière, 1999), through forms of democratic organisation, collective debates, artistic performance and other creative expressions (Leonardi, 2013; Velicu and Kaika, 2015; Valli; 2015). Still, confronting well-established power relationships head-on is not easy: consent, complicity and negotiation are also part of the conflict situation (Scott, 1985). This is why in this case study I consider also non-confrontational local engagements with corporate forestry projects and their relation to subject-formation.

In this chapter I mobilise an emotional political ecology (Sultana, 2015) in order to better understand environmental conflicts, putting emotional geographies in conversation with power issues. Emotional geographies understand “emotion experientially and conceptually in terms of

21. In Foucauldian terms.


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its socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as entirely interiorised subjective mental states” (Davidson et al., 2005: 3). I thus understand emotions as embodied experiences that imply individual and collective ways of thinking, engagements, expressions and relationships among humans and their environments, which subsequently inform political ecological relationships among people, their environments and conflicts. Without entering into the debate on emotions and affects in geography (Pile, 2010), in this chapter I understand emotions as ways of being sensitive to the expressions, moods, climates and non representational ways (Thrift, 2008) in which humans perform their feelings and build their relationships to social-ecological landscapes.

Recently, some scholars (Sultana, 2011; Singh, 2013) have considered the role of affect, emotions and embodiment in the shaping of subjectivities in water conflicts and forest conservation governance. Others have shown how locals’ relationships and attachment to places of struggle and their embodiment of conflicts via emotions are crucial for the discourse, emergence, sustainability and cohesion of social movements (Bosco, 2006; Dallman et al., 2013; Satterfield, 2002). Concerning forests, some have emphasised how this takes place via an intersubjective communication among humans and their (biophysical) environment, where cooperation and conflicts express relationships of friendship and parenthood with fauna and flora (Ingold, 2000; Kohn, 2007), embodied caring practices (Singh, 2013) and relationships framed by sacredness (Tebtebba Foundation, 2011).

Trees and forests are usually portrayed as carriers of aesthetic appreciation, identities, spirituality and feelings of social belonging (Buijs and Lawrence, 2013), which are considered triggers for discourse and action (Milton, 2002). While the relevance that such “positive” emotions regarding nature have for subjects and movements defending forests and commons has been registered in political ecology (Shiva, 1993; Nightingale, 2011b; Singh, 2013), “negative” emotions have been largely overlooked. Anger, grief and disgust have been considered as promoters for action in the case of losing loved forests, but not as grounded ways of relating to tree plantations. I consider such relating in a concrete case of conflict over tree plantations in southern Chile, where I (inter alia) draw evidence from political and spiritual Mapuche gatherings for understanding the relevance of “negative” emotions for the process of subject-making.

3. Methods

I conducted an in-depth case study (Yin, 2003) in Arauco, Chile, the southernmost province of the Biobío Region, covering the coastal plain south of the Biobío River, the eastern slope of the Nahuelbuta Mountain Range down to the Pacific Ocean (Figure IV.1), and areas in the western side of the mountains (eastern side of Biobío Region and in the North of Araucanía Region)22. This area was selected for its high concentration of tree plantations, mainly owned by the companies

22. In the chapter I refer to the case study area as Arauco.


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Arauco and Mininco-CMPC. Individual landowners (both Chilean and indigenous Mapuche23) also participate in the plantation economy. Scattered indigenous communities resist tree plantations and have land conflicts with the forestry companies; the area is characterised as “critical” by state forestry authorities due to the high surface burned and number of fires.

Figure IV.1: Situation map of fieldwork in southern Chile. Own elaboration with cartographic data from GADM and CONAF. GRS WGS84, Datum WGS84. Main map: own elaboration with cartographic data of BCN, CGIAR-CSI, Digital Chart of the World, CONAF and GADM repositories. SRS: UTM 19S, Datum WGS84. Elaborated by M. Borròs, with support of P. Pliscoff.

23. Although Mapuche are considered Chilean in terms of citizenship since 1819, my distinction here is in terms of identity.


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Fieldwork developed in two phases: first, scoping visits in June and September 2013 were followed by longer periods of direct observation and interviews between January-September 2014. I conducted 43 semi-structured, in-depth interviews, with a purposive sample of local and national representatives of state and private forestry institutions (in the area and the cities of Santiago, Concepción and Temuco), peasant24 and indigenous communities. Local interviewees involved people living adjacent to company-owned tree plantations. Interviewees were selected through snowball sampling, with the help of key informants. Fieldwork also included two experiences of direct observation: first, three days of direct observation of the educational and community relationships programme that Working on Fire (WoF), an enterprise subcontracted by Arauco Co., develops in the area to promote fire prevention; second, several instances of participation in the daily political arrangements of Mapuche communities in the area, as well as their livelihood activities, political meetings and rituals.

Given the significant conflict between state, forestry companies, and indigenous communities in certain areas, my research was – unsurprisingly – viewed with suspicion, which in some cases complicated access to both companies (which did not facilitate financial data I asked for or rejected conceding interviews) and communities. Primary data were complemented with analysis of national and regional news, reports, policies and documents related to the area and the forestry industry.

3.1 Overview of the Conflict

In Arauco, tree plantations cover 315.331 ha, 58% of the province’s surface. Forestation rate of Arauco’s communes25 vary between the massively planted commune of Curanilahue (82% of its surface) and the more farmland type of landscape of Cañete (42%) (INE, 2007). The expansion of the forestry frontier in the last decades has had profound impacts upon peasant and rural economies: in 2002, 34% of Arauco’s population lived in rural areas, 30% less than forty years ago (INE, 2002). As regards plantation species, Pinus radiata (63%) predominate over Eucalyptus globulus (33%) and Eucalyptus nitens plantations (3%) (INFOR, 2009). Except for two protected areas (Monumento Nacional Contulmo and Nahuelbuta Park) native forests are essentially shrubs appearing in between or in the margins of tree plantations, which are either property of the companies or small plots that mix exotic and native forests.

Arauco is one of the areas in southern Chile where indigenous land rights are in dispute, precisely where Pinus and Eucalyptus grow. The expansion and establishment of forestry in the region has been possible thanks to state subsidies to big private companies, which now concentrate property and control most phases of the commodity chain. Conflict is, first, about

24. I use the term “peasant” to refer to people embedded in a peasant economy, to take into account the blurry manner in which rural labour was organised in 20th century southern Chile among tenant farmers, resident and day estate labourers, squatters, settlers, indigenous reductions, share croppers, etc. (Klubock, 2014).

25. Communes are the smallest administrative unit in Chile, roughly equal to British municipalities.


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property. Indigenous Mapuche reclaim that the lands where tree plantations now stand are part of their ancestral territory, maintained by means of several battles and truces until the independence of Chile from the Spanish Crown. Indigenous and non-indigenous peasants also denounce having been forced to sell their properties in the last 40 years when the expansion of tree plantations became massive. Secondly, conflict is about the long lasting impacts of tree plantations on local populations’ daily livelihoods: blocking access to land, reducing availability of water, pollution, forced migration and lack of work opportunities. Impacts are framed also in terms of economic inequality since, while tree plantations belong to the richest families in Chile26, Arauco is one of the poorest provinces in the country in terms of GDP per capita (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, 2011). Enterprises argue that they have obtained lands legally under Chilean laws, that they develop an economically and environmentally sustainable activity, and claim to have good relationships with most communities.

Conflict around tree plantations is part of what is internationally known as “the Mapuche conflict”, which involves disputes with forestry companies and big landowners over resources such as land and forests and access rights to the sea and rivers (Skewes and Guerra, 2004), all of them crucial elements of the Mapuche conception of “the territory”. Mapuche means “the people of the land” (Mapu=land, che=people) – in coastal areas indigenous Mapuche communities are also Lafkenche, “the people of the sea” (Lafken=sea). Mapuche claims also seek to recover their native language, health and spirituality (Bengoa, 2012). Although in the last 30 years, the Chilean state, via its National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI), has transferred more than 160,000 ha of land to Mapuche individuals and communities27, conflict continues.

The conflict has entered a more violent phase since the 1990s, when the burning of companies’ trucks and plots began and state repression scaled up28. The Arauco-Malleco Coordination (CAM29), a loosely-structured Mapuche anti-capitalist group supporting communities “in resistance”, whose practices are based on direct action pursuing effective territorial control, has apparently accepted to have conducted fire attacks to plantations and forestry infrastructures30. For CAM and communities in resistance, land is not the same as territory. The current strategy of land acquisitions through CONADI is criticised for being

26. See Forbes list for the World’s billionaires. http://www.forbes.com/profile/roberto-angelini-rossi/; http://www.forbes.com/profile/eliodoro-matte/ [Accessed 15.05.2015].

27. Since 1993, CONADI has invested more than US$ 400 million in its programmes for determination of indigenous lands (INDH, 2014).

28. In areas with conflicts over corporate tree plantations, state investments reflect high expenses for maintaining national police forces (García-Huidobro, 2015).

29. In Spanish, Coordinadora de Comunidades en Conflicto Arauco-Malleco (Arauco- Malleco Coordinator of communities in conflict), usually known as Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco. Malleco is one of the two provinces of Araucanía, next to Arauco.

30. See Coordinator of communities in conflict, http://www.weftun.org/ [Accessed 15.05.2015]


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conducted through the market and for safeguarding capitalist investment, since “usurper farmers or forestry companies, after having profited from years of Mapuche lands, are compensated with millions by the State so that they can continue to invest” (Llaitul, 2014). Mapuche activists or supporters have been accused under Chile’s antiterrorist law and now 29 of them are in jail31, charged with crimes such as robbery, carrying weapons and, in some cases, setting fires. In 2013, for the first time a Mapuche shaman (Wentxumachi) was imprisoned after being convicted of starting a fire that killed a couple of landowners in Araucanía. Also, 12 people from Mapuche communities have died in post-dictatorship confrontations with the State. Most condemning court decisions are based on testimonies of “protected witnesses”, which is denounced as fraudulent and has been recognised as such by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights32.

4. Histories of Dispossession: State-building, Capital Accumulation and Forestry in Arauco

Before Spanish colonisation (1598-1810), scattered indigenous communities of Mapuche (called Araucanos by the Spanish) lived in the temperate forests of southern Chile and Argentina, where they cleared forest for establishing settlements. Their subsistence economy was based on hunter-gathering, which guaranteed the presence of extensive forest and high biodiversity (Camus, 2006). The maintenance of dense and wild vegetation facilitated indigenous struggle in their long and violent confrontation against the Spanish Empire33. During the 17th century, Mapuche resistance prevented Spanish colonisation of the territory, and the Mapuche formally established their autonomy with the treaty of Quillín in 1641, setting the colonisers’ southernmost frontier at the river Biobío. The establishment of the frontier implied important transformations. First, the Mapuche adopted Spanish crops and livestock transforming their economy into a production-oriented one based on livestock, salt and textiles to be traded with the colony (Pinto, 2003). Second, the accumulation of wealth that resulted from that process was accompanied by an accumulation of political power too, since Mapuche organisation and representation became more centralised (Bengoa, 1996).

Those frontier relationships broke down when the state of Chile declared its independence from Spain (1810) and Mapuche were made Chilean citizens (1819): the frontier began to slowly disintegrate through land acquisitions by Chilean and, afterwards, German colonisers. The Pacification of Araucanía in Chile (1860-1881) and the Conquest of the Desert in Argentina (1878- 1885) involved violent state strategies for land control, including setting fire to Mapuche houses and lands, ending up with the incorporation of 5,000,000 ha of land to the state of Chile and the

31. Considered as political prisoners by CAM.

32. See Inter-American court of Human Rights, http://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/articulos/seriec_279_ing.pdf [Accessed 15.05.2015].

33. Reported in La Araucana, a first-person testimony of the intense beginning of the war of Arauco, published between 1574 and 1589, by Alonso de Ercilla. Cited in Camus (2006).


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reduction of Mapuche territories to 5% of their territory, with about 4 ha per clan member (Mella, 2007). This violent expansion of the Chilean frontier through military action was motivated by the growth of international trade in wheat, in which central Chile enjoyed an early success (Clapp, 1998), together with the consideration of indigenous populations as an inferior race (Pinto, 2003) and that Mapuche peasant economies lagged in productivity. Fire was not only a tool for the expansion of the frontier, but was also used to make available rich soils with a high amount of organic matter to be cultivated with wheat for exports (Otero, 2006). Mapuche livelihood strategies abruptly changed again due to their confinement: extensive grazing and slash-and-burn agriculture was replaced with permanent cultivation. The need for firewood and productive land led to overgrazing, erosion and destruction of native forests, transforming Mapuche into impoverished peasants (Clapp, 1998).

Chile was a granary for global markets until the Great Depression when wheat cultivation stopped being profitable. In 1931, the government decreed the first Forest Law, which conceded 30-year tax exemptions to landowners who devoted land to tree plantations. The promotion of tree plantations was inspired by the “conservationist” work of Federico Albert, a German forestry engineer contracted by the state in 1911, whose “national crusade against erosion” (Camus, 2006) saw tree-planting as a “win-win-win” solution for the area: planting trees could prevent soil erosion, reduce the extraction of native forests, and foster a prosperous industry. Promising trials took place, precisely in Arauco, with good response from pine seeds imported from California by the recently created namesake forestry company, Arauco Co. The Chilean state banked on international market demand for timber and cellulose and Arauco was an ideal area to transform for forestry extractivism: availability of dispossessed land (Mapuche reservations concentrated in the southern edge of the province) and dispossess-able land (large agricultural haciendas worked by tenant farmers), together with biophysical characteristics (e.g. , rainfall) that enabled a fast growth rate and shorter species rotation (Clapp, 1995). Between 1964 and 1973, the state established new sawmill cellulose factories and paper mills (which were to be privatised afterwards). The perspective of this emergent industry infused southern Chile with economic hope based in forestry extractivism. Even the most revolutionary times with Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-73), represented continuities in establishing the reigning forestry ideology. Providing peasants stable labour by participating in the forestry sector was seen as a solution to southern rural poverty and land inequality (Klubock, 2014). The consolidation of a neoliberal programme under the military regime of Pinochet (1973-90) was constituted through reforms for liberalisation of land and water markets and “modernisation” of industries (Budds, 2013). This concerned also the incipient forestry sector, which especially through Decree 701 of 1974, began to subsidise 75% of planting costs (Bull et al., 2006). Eighty per cent of subsidy payments went to Chile’s three largest forest companies, which shifted to private capital markets. Moreover, many of the lands that were redistributed among peasants during agrarian reform (1962-73) were returned to their previous landowners (Torres et al., 2015), which in many cases sold them to forestry enterprises. Twenty years later, a


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modification of Decree 701 (Law 19.561, 1998) motivated also individual landowners to join as suppliers of raw material to the industry. Smallholders stopped being considered obstacles for forestry expansion and begun to receive subsidies for planting trees. Today, the active political interventions of the last 40 years have achieved to slightly diversify the huge dependency of Chile’s economy on its traditional commodities (copper and nitrates) and forestry contributes 3.1% to national GDP. In 2014, forestry export earnings were above US$6 billion, five times over 1992 earnings (INFOR, 2014) and plantations expanded along 3,000,000 ha, with property highly concentrated in big estates (Torres et al., 2015).

Although peasant tree-farming in the late 1980s brought some economic relief for certain rural households and Mapuche communities (Clapp, 1998), local communities have denounced the long lasting impacts of forestry expansion on their livelihoods. Forestry workers have also denounced precarious labour conditions and obstacles to unionising established during the dictatorship and still maintained in numerous sectors.

Forestry companies Arauco and Mininco-CMPC own extensive areas of tree plantations in my area of study. They also control all phases of the commodity chain (from plantation to pulp or saw mill processing) and have assets in several Latin American countries. There are also new multinational companies in the area, such as Volterra (Japanese capital) as well as smaller local forestry companies. Other tree plantations belong to peasant and indigenous small-tenants who either use wood for themselves or sell timber to intermediaries to process it in the industrial centres of the bigger companies. Like other parts of southern Chile, Mapuche have risen in protest since the 1990s in Arauco. Most self-defined as “in resistance” Mapuche communities squat land as a form of direct and quiet action for achieving effective territorial control. Through recovering land, communities organise themselves collectively or according to household and plant potatoes, wheat and peas on a small scale, recuperate their extensive livestock practices and decide to what extent they want to depend on tree farming. Direct action is combined with claims for the restitution of ancestral lands via Convention number 169 of UN’s International Labour Organisation, and with negotiating with the state and forestry companies so that the former buys land from private owners.

During the summer, security control increases dramatically in Arauco since the province is characterised as critical by state forestry institutions due to the large area burned and high number of fires. A high presence of Carabineros (the national police force) is common, especially near corporate plots close to the harvest period, since locals (and especially Mapuche) are accused of either illegally harvesting or setting them on fire. A total of 1,690 people have being accused of setting fires in Arauco between 2003-2014, while the state has formally identified and pressed charges on only ten of them34.

34. Information via Law 20.285, Law of Transparency, Fiscalía Región del Biobío.


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5. Accumulating through Disciplining: the Case of Fire Control

The massive areas dedicated to tree plantations one sees today in southern Chile are the contemporary expression of a long history of successes and failures for land control by diverse groups. The history of the forestry sector is closely connected to the history of fire control technologies. As explained before, fire was a useful tool to establish land control during the expansion of the national and agrarian frontier in southern Chile. More recently, fire has also been useful for the expansion of the forestry frontier as many of the existing plots were cleared thanks to fire (Echeverría et al., 2006; confirmed by elder peasants interviewed). However, once tree plantations were in place, fire had to be stopped again, i.e., reversing the fire regime became essential.

Nowadays, companies offering fire-control and fire-fighting services are strategic partners of forestry companies, and thus part of the capital accumulation forestry project. The fire management budgets of private companies and the state forestry corporation (Corporación de Fomento Forestal, CONAF) are similar (about US$20 million annually), although forestry companies manage a quarter of the surface that CONAF does. In the national accounts of the forestry sector (2005-2013), fire fighting tends to be the second economic activity in terms of sales, after forestry exploitation and the first in number of workers (Table IV.1). For example, FAASA, the main company in technology provision (airplanes and helicopters) to private companies and CONAF, has declared a 50% increase in profits between 2003 and 2010. Notably, most of the labour that fire fighting demands is temporary, which involves precarious subcontracting and security conditions (Forestry trade-union representative, CTF Chile, 28.02.2014).

Table IV.1. National economic information for the forestry sector in 2013. Own elaboration. Source: Servicio de Impuestos Internos, Chile

Forestry, wood extraction Number of Sales Number of informed Net income of informed and other services related companies (billion US$) dependant workers dependant workers (billion US$)

Forestry exploitation 1,285 985,646 13,979 31,550

Services for the control 806 232,031 31,516 44,362of forest fires

Re-forestation services 393 105,496 5,481 4,440

Cutting wood services 834 32,298 2,862 1,813

Exploitation of tree 115 10,367 658 840nurseries

Non-timber forest 111 5,373 649 435products recollection

Other activities related 754 85,180 11,636 11,060to forestry


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Extinguishing fires is the principal fire control strategy– e.g., ahead of prevention – as it ensures efficiency in the sense of low surface burnt and reaction time. Companies guarantee being in location where a fire begins in 10 minutes (Head of the Patrimony Protection of Arauco Co.,25.02.2014). This explains the low annual surface area of forestry company plots affected despite the high number of fires (CONAF, 2015). However, aerial fire fighting costs are extremely high and during the summer companies are overwhelmed by simultaneous fires. Companies are thus increasingly incorporating a prevention strategy to protect their assets. This strategy is based on the understanding that fires occur as a consequence of individual misconducts, therefore individual motivations must be investigated and changed (Responsible of fire-prevention education campaigns, CONAF, 02.12.2013). While CONAF has always used this leitmotiv in fire prevention campaigns and activities addressed to the general public, companies have only recently started establishing close relationships with surrounding communities as part of their prevention activities. Arauco Co.’s fire prevention budget, for example, has quadrupled in the last ten years although it is still only approximately 1% of the total fire budget (Head of the Patrimony Protection of Arauco Co. and Head of WoF, 25.02.2014). In areas with high fire occurrence, corporate disciplinary mechanisms for the sake of fire prevention are based on three interrelated strategies of individual responsibilisation: visibility, education and intervention. Those strategies are realised by some of the following practices: 1) Distribution of door-to-door propaganda material and short talks with locals guarantees the

company’s visibility. Advertising can spread values such as (individual) responsibility, work and collaboration through fire prevention. Figure IV.2 shows one such example from an advertising campaign: a coypu (CONAF’s image for fire prevention, named Forestín, inspired in US Forest mascot Smokey Bear, CONAF, 2013) and an owl (CORMA’s image, named Silvestre, which paradoxically means “wild”) hug a pine tree. The characters request collaboration for the protection of their habitat, a continuous pine mass, asking locals close to plantations to call and warn the company or fire-fighters when they see a fire in the area. In this way they clearly express the kind of subject they desire: the friendly collaborator, the “good neighbour”.

2) Educational campaigns in schools and local associations through recreational activities aim to

explain and instil, especially in children, values about nature, the benefits of the forestry industry and impacts of tree plantation fires. Arauco Co. calls this programme Forest Guardians as kids swear “before God, homeland and flag” to be forest guardians. Children are to be educated not only as future obedient generations but also as vehicles of spreading values to their families: “After the workshop, kids will arrive at their houses and tell their families how the

enterprise does things fine, and how they had a good time. Their parents are those adults that are now against us…We also do workshops for adults and elders, and so, we close the circle. We reach all generational groups that are close to the plantation’s activity” (Worker at WOF, develops workshops with local communities, 27.02.2014).


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The whole community is targeted by those educational campaigns, since workshops are usually accompanied by activities for the broader public with no direct forest-related content, such as hairdressing or medical services, organisation of football tournaments for youngsters, and excursions for elders. Satisfaction of such community requirements helps to set “a relationship of belonging between locals and the company” (worker at WoF, 27.02.2014).

3) Direct intervention of companies in local communities can take place in areas with high occurrence of intentional fires. Intervention aims to transform locals’ relationship with the plantation and the company, since “.... when there is a good relationship with the companies, communities protect the forest....” (National Head for Forest Fires at CONAF, 03.12.2013).

Intervention involves enterprises acting as mediators in local conflicts which can spark plantation fires, or as service (e.g., pave local paths) providers and providers of economic opportunities (employment, access to wood leftovers after harvests, etc.). Good relationships can take place by means of co-optation, as the Head of WoF put it:

“In an area with lots of fires every year...we decided to hire someone from the community, as a watchman, with a motorcycle. Fires went down by a factor of 20...either we are successfully involving communities or hiring the arsonists, I don’t know, but the point is that it works” (25.02. 2014).

Figure IV.2 CONAF and CORMA (association of plantation owners, with high participation of the main companies) propaganda material. The text reads: “Help us! It depends on you to prevent forest fires”. Source: CORMA.


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All those mechanisms serve forestry enterprises to present themselves as “good neighbours”, “differently to all the errors we committed in the past”, as a young Arauco Co. forestry engineer told me referring to the violent land grabbing practices explained in Section 4. In return, companies expect that local communities also act as good neighbours.

Relationships between companies and Mapuche self-declared “in-resistance” communities can involve such strategies of consent, but establishment of discipline through coercive strategies is also remarkable. Some communities denounce that after fires in Mapuche territory, they are repressed, criminalised and raided. For example after a fire in 2012 in Carahue, a province of Araucanía close to Arauco Province, where seven firemen died during the extinction tasks at Mininco-CMPC Co. assets, one Mapuche community leader told me:

“The Minister of Interior appealed to the Antiterrorist law pointing directly to us, as responsible for initiating the fire, without any willingness to know what really happened...like in other cases when they came into our space, breaking the fences, the plots, the houses” (06.03.2014).

Politicians and national media create a popular scapegoat image of Mapuche by presenting them as the sole culprits of fires (López and Nitrihual, 2013). Fire-control is not only a way to realise a slow disciplinary system of transformation of the self but also serves to violently punish those suspicious of getting in the way of the capital accumulation project.

In brief, the Chilean state offloads part of the responsibility of facilitating the success of the extractivist sector to individuals via criminalisation, but also indirectly through the educational and “good neighbour” forestry enterprise programmes. While some locals are pointed out as “radical”, “terrorist” or “anti-development”, others give some hope: they can be transformed into “more developed, healthy, …using democratic ways of protest” (National Head for Forest Fires at CONAF, 03.12.2013). However, this disciplinary process of subject formation is not always successful.

6. Local Reactions and Struggles for Sovereignty: Attempts to Affect Land Control

In contrast to fire risk perceptions research (e.g., Collins, 2012), I found that locals perceive themselves so worse-off due to forestry intrusion in their daily lives that they see fire risk as accidental whereas forestry impacts as constant:

“When the Arauco Co. fire-prevention expert came here saying «protect the plantations from fires because forest is life», I told him «before we had water streams that we used for irrigation, for bathing...Water is life, land is life...But if you are drying the rivers and polluting the air, what life are you talking about? »” (neighbourhood leader, 08.02.2014).


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Locals are not immune to forestry companies’ disciplinary strategies to minimise conflict but fires open up pathways for bargaining. Locals can perform different roles, such as the “victim” observed in small rural-fishing settlements on Arauco Gulf, where people lost their planted plots due to a fire that begun in Arauco Co. estates in January 2014. Residents were frustrated by the loss of income after eight years of waiting for trees to grow and demanded compensations:

“We have lost years of investment...we want them [Arauco Co.] to help us replant, to buy new hoses...they are a big company and have the resources to help us” (neighbourhood leader, 08.02.2014).

After the fire, locals did not reconsider at all if their main source of economic income was exposed to a vulnerable activity, but on the contrary, asked for company help to replant as soon as possible. In the eastern slopes of Nahuelbuta mountains, I met locals performing a more active negotiation. Locals implicitly assured the WoF fire-prevention expert they would “behave well” (not set fires) if they received what they wanted:

“I think that they [Arauco Co.] wait till people misbehave, to appear around here. Only then they say, «let’s help them, because otherwise they will continue to harm us»” (neighbourhood committee member, 27.02.2014).

Demands were varied: ensure that locals enjoy equal access to timber, access to forestry jobs, and financial support for local activities such as a football field or paving a road. Those demands were justified as legitimate given the impacts and risks to which locals are exposed to from forestry activity and the huge inequality between their and forestry companies’ incomes.

Also, some Mapuche communities collectively cut and harvest tree plantations illegally as a strategy for territorial recovery while using timber for household consumption or selling it in the black market. Some Mapuche supporters see this as problematic, since

“although Mapuche act as the legitimate owners of the territory, they go into the capitalist circuit of extractivism” (09.06.2014).

But this form of land control is effective: what the companies and the state call “timber robbery” (Neira and Guerrero, 2014) has discouraged expanding forestry extractivism in the area, and obliged companies to move further south. Fire attacks to plantations and forestry infrastructures seem to be effective too: CONAF and companies’ interviewees complained that, in certain areas, extinction patrols would not enter to check fires since helicopters and other infrastructure have been attacked and burnt.

In any case, most interviewees built their own narratives on why fires happen. These illustrate that they do not totally internalise state and private entrepreneurial discourses that


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point the finger to individual culprits. Ecological characteristics of tree plantations, such as high propagation probability, the high water consumption and flammability of pines and eucalyptus are arguments locals give for explaining the seasonal existence of fires35:

“they [forestry companies] planted all around here...and so close to our houses...so everything dries up and sets on fire so quickly!” (Mapuche community leader, 24.09.2013)

Fire occurrence is also explained economically: some locals explain fires as organised self-attacks from companies, which enable them to get rid of pines affected by the plague of Sirex noctilio, collect insurance money, and to blame and expel communities.

“the pines had a kind of bug, that was drying them from inside...we said that in several occasions. It has not been proved, but we think that the fire was convenient for the company, because that way they can have a perfect business” (Mapuche community leader, 06.03.2014)

Recently, landowners, forestry companies, fire-fighters and state policemen have been found to have initiated fires (Cayuqueo, 2006), thus inverting the widespread accusation of Mapuche communities as arsonists. On the ground, some inhabitants reproduce politician and national media’s discourses and accuse Mapuche for all fires, but others show empathy to the feeling of impotence that power inequality causes:

“Nowadays several people say «I cannot stand this anymore, I set it all on fire and it is done!». And it is understandable, because it is the helplessness, the anger of not having enough money to pay lawyers to beat the companies and the state…because the state puts its trust more to entrepreneurs rather than the people that live and suffer on the land”. (Mapuche upholding a land conflict with Volterra Co., 18.02.2014).

Through those narratives locals develop feelings of distrust towards forestry enterprises, and avoid falling into the “good neighbour” role that enterprises and the state have in stock for them. This attitude of un-discipline is strongly influenced by emotions that reveal themselves at gatherings of self-denominated “in-resistance” Mapuche communities.

7. Ritual, Emotions and Politics

The ethnographic material collected for this study was drawn from participation in political and spiritual Mapuche gatherings. Those gatherings were organised in the context of conflicts concerning communities that pursued land recuperation, or as territorial meetings to discuss challenges faced by communities. Communities (lof), families or individuals of the area

35. Some of those arguments are also scientifically supported (e.g., see Peña- Fernández and Valenzuela-Palma, 2008). Information via Law 20.285, Law of Transparency, Fiscalía Región del Biobío.


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self-organise to travel up to 150 km, since attendance is understood as a way of supporting and showing willingness to discuss with others. Ceremonies happen around a rewe, a kind of altar with a branch of Drimys winteri (a native tree sacred for Mapuche, now absent in the area) and a dark purple flag with an eight-pointed white star, also known as Leftraru’s flag, a 16th century Mapuche hero of the battle of Arauco against the Spanish conqueror Pedro de Valdivia. Around this altar of ecological resistance, attendants engage in various acts of mutuality and exchange, which involve symbols and ecological-political-sacred figures. They do this via praying, dancing and playing music, using their drums, bells and trumpets. Music also accompanies visits to disputed territories, such as water springs, old cemeteries and other Mapuche sacred places. Forestry companies characterise those sites as “places of cultural significance” in their programmes of building relationships with the communities, and walking towards them involves going through a green blanket of tree plantations (Figure IV.3).

Figure IV.3 Members of a Mapuche trawun (parliament) in Arauco visit the areas in dispute.Source: Mapuche community organising the gathering. Distributed with permission.

The monotonous rows of fruitless36 trees of mono-cropped species offers no motivation to stop and interact with nature. On the contrary, the walk is always interrupted when someone identifies native flora at the side of the path, revealing moments of direct interaction among participants and with nature, mixing enjoyment, knowledge and subsistence as forms of

36. I mean trees with no fruits for human alimentary or medicinal use.


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intersubjective communication (Milton, 2002; Ingold, 2000). In contrast to pine and eucalyptus trees, which only provide timber and cellulose, native species offer a variety of non-timber products: attendants can stop to pick up mushrooms (Cyttaria sp; Clavaria coralloides) and fruits from trees (Aristotelia chilensis), bushes (Ugni molinae) and herbaceous species (Gunnera chilensis), and joyfully share among them cooking recipes and medicinal uses (see Tacón 2004). Domestic species that persist raise memories and feelings of nostalgia, which are related to politically-relevant information about the history of land occupation:

“Look, here is an apple tree...Who knows why the forestry enterprises did not cut it down! This means there was a house here, a family lived here before all this was planted…I remember coming here, to swim in the river. It was so nice to see the wheat and the animals around….” (old Chilean settlers dispossessed during the dictatorship’s agrarian counter-reform, 20.01.2016)

While walking, those memories of the past combine with present-day, intimate emotions that allow the visualisation of socio-spatial transformations and motivate action:

“When I was an adult, I came back to the place where I had grown up, and there I could not contain my emotions...I could not believe that I could see in real images the memories I kept as a child. I felt sorrow, anger, nostalgia and joy, even some parts of our house were still there! [...] Since then, we started with more passion. I think that’s what makes one to act because sometimes we think it’s a waste of time, but from there on I got involved, in order to come back here…and recuperate our crops and our ranch” (Chilean settler dispossessed during the dictatorship’s agrarian counter-reform, 20.01.2016)37.

Those emotive memories and connections to the land combine with Mapuche cultural beliefs. According to Mapuche world-views, in areas densely planted, spirits are disappearing from the land due to the expansion of tree plantations and the reduction of water. During the gatherings, the presence of traditional authorities (Machi or Wentxumachi, female or male shaman; Longko, community leader) was acknowledged by several attendants as “an emotional injection to continue with the struggle” (Mapuche community leader), given their knowledge and their political commitment. Crucially, and beyond mobilising the support of those leading figures (spirits or indigenous authorities), gatherings are important for empowering those who are usually not entitled to power:

“While forestry enterprises have the support of the state, we are here together to support ourselves” (Mapuche community leader welcoming attendants to the gathering, 22.02.2014).

37. These quotes refer to a concrete case of organised resistance in Arauco where a Mapuche community and the peasant settlers dispossessed during the Agrarian Counter-Reform (1974-1980) work together to recuperate their lands.


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Before and after the ceremonies group talks took place, which enabled attendants to follow up and exchange strategies over the general situation of the territory. Attendants reported on current difficulties of the territories they came from in relation to long lasting conflicts about land property, or new projects (wind farms, tree plantations, hydroelectric power plants, etc.), the health of community members, and the risks they are facing, such as being evicted, court trials, lack of water, etc. This exchange of information serves to

“learn from each other, and understand better what is happening [because] we need to retain dignity, as those people [forestry companies] think they can buy us entirely” (Mapuche attending a gathering, 14.06.2014).

In such a context, dignity is usually referred to as resisting the ways in which forestry extractivism, including the new trend of “good neighbour” techniques, tries to make them part of its project. For others, it means re-appropriating the Mapuche identity of “the people of the land” and thus the control or capacity to decide for themselves on essential aspects of their lives, such as land and water, language or religion, as other indigenous peoples do in Latin America (Porto-Gonalves and Leff, 2015). Several seek the root of the difficulty to achieve self-determination by recalling their memories of dispossession, and express in emotional terms how embodying that past is what motivates them to act politically:

“(…) our parents and grandparents have been tortured and humiliated, we live and have lived in such precarious conditions…it’s not easy to forget that. [...] Now, we want to remove the power that state and enterprises have upon us” (Mapuche attending a gathering, 14.06.2014).

However, and although the experiences shared through “negative” emotions of anger and sorrow revealed the difficulties and problems faced by the communities, there was always space for conviviality and plans for political success. After participants expressed their problems and sufferings, they also shared their strategies for pursuing autonomous control over lands and handle everyday confrontations with enterprises and the state: demands to CONADI, organising demonstrations or meetings, exercising the right to walk across plots in search for leftovers from tree harvest, look for medicines or visit culturally significant places, illegal collective wood harvesting, trials to substitute pines and eucalyptus for native and crop species. After each intervention, all joined in an emotional acclamation (or “afafán”) while shaking branches of Drimys winteri and shouting “Marichiweu!”, meaning “By tenfold we will win!”, thus giving political consistency to the interventions (field notes, 22.02.2014).

All those aspects of the gatherings, the performance around the rewe, the interactive walks into spaces of dispute and the formal and informal talks taking place in the context of ceremonies, allow participants to listen to each other and listen to others’ stories, as well as feed collective emotions of anger, sorrow and pain, which provide an emotional leverage for


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building their un-disciplined subjectivity. Their relational experiences in between plantations, expressing one’s and listening to others’ stories and narratives helps communities to maintain and reinforce their sense of distrust to projects such as the “good neighbour” that threaten their sovereignty. After these gatherings, individuals and communities go back to their houses having more newen, a word that conveys a broad concept of strength, energy or power and which is related to Mapuche beliefs in animate and inanimate spirits (Di Gimiani, 2013). Importantly, newen also feeds into collective action, as participants use the word informally (“Have a lot of newen, lamuen!” meaning “Be strong, brother or sister”, field notes, 22.02.2014) to give courage to comrades and thus support them maintain daily resistance in their efforts to control land and be themselves the shapers of their own subjectivities.

8. Conclusions: sovereignty, political subjectivation and emotions in environmental conflicts The previous four sections illustrated how Chilean forestry extractivism relies on a succession of struggles to control land. I have explained how the current land control configuration occurs through and is the result of the imposition of ecological discipline with regards to tree plantations (e.g., through fire control), as well as different strategies with which locals react to it, such as dependence, negotiation and resistance. I have shown different ways in which actors try to get in the way of the forestry project by struggling to retain the capacity to take decisions about their own lives, and ways in which collective practices (e.g., rituals) release emotions that serve as resources for that project. I find that there are two main implications of this as concerns the relevant literature. First, that emotions contribute to the transformation of tree plantation conflicts into conflicts over sovereignty. Connecting to their emotions allows locals to react against imposed land control and subject-making projects but also pursue strategies to gain or maintain control over how to manage the territory and their own subjectivity-formation process. Second, this case study highlights the fundamental need to pay attention to the role of emotions when analysing processes of political subjectivation in environmental conflict studies. I emphasise the need to acknowledge the role of so-called “negative” emotions such as sorrow and anger, as relevant expressions that help to disrupt and rupture imperatives and mandates of land control.

This case supports Peluso and Lund’s (2011) idea that contemporary land control seeks to establish itself by means of diverse strategies, both subtle and violent. Informality, environmental education and co-optation play important roles when subject-making is a crucial strategy as evidenced in the educational and communitarian work that companies develop in my case. In a context where forestry extractivism dominates most local decisions and locals “used to permit companies to trample on us” (interview with elder peasant, 07.02.2014), locals’ attitude to project their voice (even if it is to ask for help or negotiate) represents a governance rupture. Struggles for sovereignty express in diverse ways: struggles to maintain the ability to remain in


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the territory (Williams-Eynon, 2013), by claiming the right to a secure income (e.g., near Arauco Gulf), through forcing decisions about the use of resources for community leisure (e.g. near Nahuelbuta Mountains), or by exercising land control through Mapuche self-organising. Local reactions go beyond simple distinctions between extractivist, resistance and environmentalist subjectivities. In Arauco, subjectivities are strongly influenced by the quest for sovereignty, in the sense that communities seek to recover the right to decide up to what point they will depend on extractivism (e.g., by setting up their own mini-plantations), resist forestry institutional power in the territories (e.g., via active protest), or perform environmentalist practices and hold environmentalist discourses. The choice of strategy depends on the extent to which they can improve community ability to decide about their own lives. All strategies – no matter if classified as dependent, negotiating or resisting, successful or not – aim at gaining spaces of self-government, affecting the current concentration of land control, and performing sovereignty over the territory and their lives. That is, they comprise struggles to practice “the right of working peoples to have effective access to, use of, and control over land and the benefits of its use and occupation, where land is understood as resource, territory, and landscape” (Borras and Franco, 2012: 1).

This case shows that sovereignty goes beyond water, land and territory: while companies and the state pursue a “good neighbourhood” strategy through forging certain values about nature via education or co-optation, some locals react by struggling and trying to be sovereign in the process of their own subject-making, reclaiming the right to think, feel, act and relate to the territory in their own ways. This call for sovereignty is expressed through sharing counter-hegemononic stories, memories, land titles and emotions, permeating and constituting thus the daily life of those who reclaim lands, territory and different developments in Arauco. When locals build their own explanations on the causality of fires, establish the terms or reject negotiations with state and private institutions and maintain indigenous language, rituals and autonomous political organisation they exercise a sort of biopower from below (Hardt, 1999; Singh 2013). This enables them to move beyond their allocated places of “good neighbours” protecting the pine, and break with subjection tendencies of the type “we used to permit companies to trample upon us” through attitudes like “we no longer accept the companies’ painkillers” (interview with a suburban settler, 26.02.2014). That said, and regardless of its critical importance, the success of such “biopower from below” to uproot the oppressive character of asymmetrical power relations and unequal natural resource control distribution in the area is currently limited.

Sovereign subjectivities are shaped not only by beliefs, but also by everyday experiences (Agrawal, 2005) such as interactive walks around the plantations and the ritual uses of the plantation space, which shape collective beliefs about land and sovereignty. Beyond the land and capital concentration, and inequality implications of tree plantations, the ecological characteristics and landscape effect of monocultures also influence the way in which the relation among subjectivities and trees takes place (or not). They contribute to the formation


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of a collective subjectivity (Singh, 2013), albeit through diverse actions, such as representation in institutionalised politics, or the establishment of a horizontal “traditional” organization of managing resources (Marimán, 2012). This reveals an ecological basis to resistance: tree plantations of exotic species are seen as threatening local water availability and “lessen life” rather than support the “forests as life” narrative promoted by corporate forestry. Their continuity and material need of water, the ease with which they burn, their lack of fruits for medicinal or food uses also frame and shape local political response.

Side-by-side with material resources, my case shows that emotions comprise strategic dimensions of subject-making in plantation conflicts. Through fire prevention strategies, state and forestry companies seek to force hegemonic discourses framed as value-neutral as a means of projecting “scientific” and hence common sense approaches to resource management in order to facilitate corporate land control. Other strategies try to instil fear to locals of being found guilty of misconduct (e.g., if they overlook their fire prevention tasks) or even being accused as terrorists (e.g., if accused to have set the plantation on fire). But self-denominated “in resistance” Mapuche communities struggle in their own ways to build their own subjectivities. Also for them, corporate tree plantations have an emotional load but different to the one that state and companies promote. Repetitive timber and cellulose trees offer scant opportunities to frame relationships of love or care towards them. And, if there is no room for an emotional experience with those trees, Milton (2002) would say, it is quite impossible that they are transformed into “forest guardians”. On the contrary, while truckloads bursting with harvested logs pass around constantly, reflection on the inequalities in terms of land, money and power come easily to their minds. Daily water shortages due to the thirsty needs of tree monocultures (González-Hidalgo, 2015) and surviving memories of the land frame local narratives, thoughts and emotions towards the same land where now tree monocultures grow.

Mapuche political resistance is intimately connected to the territory: their walks and gatherings enable them to recall the ecology of their ancestral and working landscapes (as also other indigenous peoples do – see Dallman et al., 2013). In that sense, similarly to how Ingold (2000) describes how hunting and gathering are ways of perceiving the environment, I describe how “being in resistance” constitutes locals’ way of perceiving their territory. These perceptions are updated daily through human and non-human interactions, memories and emotions, and constitute the emotional geographies of tree plantation resistance. Beneath the monocultures, there is an emotional landscape full of fruits, memories and beliefs that are invisible if “you are not from the land”; through walking and gatherings in those spaces, communities “in resistance” perform a sort of intersubjective communication that helps them actualise and renovate their critical subjectivities. Meetings, ceremonies and walks in the territory help maintain cultural identity, but also help release emotions that allow building and shaping discourse and action of political


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resistance. Finding remains of non timber-yielding species and dancing and playing music around Drimys winteri, enable the sharing and expression of satisfaction, happiness or love towards the forest that offers and receives food, medicinal and sacred resources. As in many other indigenous and “environmentalism of the poor” movements (Martínez-Alier, 2002), the performative and collective expressions of love to land and native forests shape the resistance movement to tree extractivism in southern Chile. But, it is the combination of positive and negative emotions that helps organise discourse and action (Jasper, 2012). Emotional geographies of anger and sorrow have a powerful role in shaping discourse, gaining support and maintaining a resistant subjectivity. Talks facilitate the expression of worries, nostalgias, sorrows, pains and fears associated to their daily interaction with the landscape that surrounds them, their memories and their daily confrontations with forestry extractivism. The sharing of mutual emotional experiences of resistance is important not only for the sustaining of the movement in a context of spatial dispersion (Bosco, 2006), but also because it feeds the process of political subjectivation of Mapuche communities. Emotions help Mapuche rupture the order of legitimacy and domination (Rancière, 2001) of “good neighbourhood” schemes and open new spaces, where space, or territory is not only a “way of political thinking” (Dikeç, 2012) but also a way of political feeling in physical, emotional and spiritual terms. Therefore, although emotions such as anger and sorrow tend to be labeled as “negative” due to the feeling of distress they give rise to, my study finds out that if we focus on the work they do, and particularly on the political work they do, the characterisation of those emotions as “negative” may be well off the mark. So-called “negative” emotions may prove to be resources for resisting land and water dispossession, as well as subjectivation.

Political ecology research on environmental conflicts could benefit by considering the influence of quests for sovereignty in all relevant dimensions and scales, such as the ones I bring in. I show how studying actual responses to forestry corporate strategies of land control brings to light the emotional and personal dimension of both subject-formation and political subjectivation, and in particular the role of so-called “negative” emotions. Emotions such as anger, sorrow and grief can be important resources in the process of political subjectivation, since their expression can empower projects of resistance and sovereignty. In the context of environmental conflicts, such emotions need to be acknowledged and studied not only with relation to impacts or suffering (Sultana, 2011) but also as motivations that empower both symbolically and through helping organise resistance to environmentally-destructive practices.

El colonialismo visible te mutila sin disimulo: te prohíbe decir, te prohíbe hacer, te prohíbe ser.

El colonialismo invisible, en cambio, te convence de que la servidumbre es tu destino

y la impotencia tu naturaleza: te convence de que no se puede decir, no se puede hacer,

no se puede ser.

Visible colonialism mutilates you without concealment: it bans you to say, to do, to be.

Invisible colonialism, however, convinces you that slavery is your destiny and

impotence your nature:it convinces you that you cannot say, you cannot do,

you cannot be.

Eduardo Galeano

V. THE POLITICS OF REFLEXIVITY: SUBJECTIVITIES, ACTIVISM, ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT AND GESTALT THERAPY IN SOUTHERN CHIAPAS


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1. Environmental Conflict and Subjectivities: What Role for Psychotherapeutic Practice?

Literature on environmental conflicts describes the mobilisation of people that denounce and disrupt power inequalities embedded in environmental and land issues. Political ecology literature narrates stories where “the poor” and subaltern collectives of peasants, indigenous, workers, rural women, among others, struggle to defend themselves, their lands, livelihoods and cultures against imposed state or private appropriation that causes their dispossession (Escobar, 2001; Martínez-Alier, 2002). However, the power of people to mobilise should not be taken for granted, since daily experiences of marginalisation, extortion and violence (Nixon, 2011) can stand in the way of their mobilisation not only in physical but also subjective terms38. For example, while some local communities in conflict-ridden contexts can effectively organise themselves, others can become paralysed, convinced that they “cannot say, cannot do, cannot be” as the opening quote by Eduardo Galeano illustrates (1997:145). Or, they may externalise subjectively experienced political violence onto family and friends (Pedersen, 2002). How the behaviours and subjectivities of individuals and groups involved in ecological grassroots action are shaped by contextual forces (historical, political, cultural) and how activists and local communities intervene in this process, are questions increasingly being considered by political ecologists. Still, the understanding of what happens in the consciousness of activists needs more attention in order to go beyond a “standard script” of political identities in environmental conflicts (Robbins, 2012a: 208). This chapter emerges out of the question of whether psychotherapeutic practice can shed light – for activists and political ecologists – on subjectivities and action in relation to the “interior life” (Pulido, 2003) of environmental conflicts.

Feminist and emotional political ecologists have recently showed how subjective, emotional and performative experiences in sites of environmental dispossession function as driving forces for the politics of resistance (Dallman et al., 2013; Nightingale, 2011a, 2013; Sultana, 2015). Since people come to be disciplined by and identify with certain discourses and practices in relation to themselves and others (Butler 1997), subjectivity plays a key role in prompting dispossessed individuals, groups or communities to take action or remain inactive. Individual, collective and cross-generation subjectivities in sites of (environmental/land) conflicts can also be shaped by experiences of emotional distress such as structural racism, militarisation of daily life, policies of assimilation and cultural genocide (Martín-Baró, 1986; Mitchell and Maracle, 2005). Subjectivities are also crucial for resistance. As I explained in Chapter IV, when communities resist and face these processes, they struggle for the sovereignty not only of their territories, but also over their selves and subjectivities. However, the way in which this happens (or not) and how this unfolds among individuals combining personal, public and private dimensions still needs to be unpacked (Sultana, 2015).

38. In this chapter I use the term “subjective” to refer to particular forms of being in relation to oneself and others. “Subjectivity” is employed to stress the post-structural understanding of how these experiences are mediated by power (Butler, 1997).

V. Case Study in Mexico

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This chapter emerges out of the question of whether psychotherapeutic practice can feed current debates on political ecology regarding the role of emotions in the formation of subjectivities and action. There may be significant epistemological and political differences between the understanding of “the political” among political ecologists and psychotherapists. However, in this chapter I suggest that there is an urgency to cover the research gap that has maintained “liberation ecologies” – dedicated to analyse how “modes of production create appropriate forms of consciousness, ideologies, and politics and have a certain level and type of effect on natural environment” (Peet and Watts, 2004: 28) – distant from “liberation psychologies”, whose aim is to practically work on the intimate relationship between personal and social alienation (Martín-Baró, 1986; Montero, 2007). My take is that by filling this gap, political ecologists may better understand and act upon the psycho-social implications of environmental dispossessions and activism.

In this chapter, evidence for discussion comes from my analysis of the work of Edupaz, a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Chiapas (Mexico), that develops Gestalt Therapy (GT hereafter) workshops for indigenous and peasant activists. My first aim is to analyse whether these workshops help activists deepen their reflexivity on their own life-stories and subjectivities. My second aim is to examine if this reflexivity implies new or increased forms of political participation/action. I chose the case of Edupaz for several reasons. On the one hand, Edupaz is unique in that one of its explicit goals is to support peasants in economic, environmental and emotional terms, a combination that is unusual in peasant and environmental groups. Edupaz furthermore uses a broad framework of GT to deal with the emotional, an uncommon approach in community psychology. Also, the setting where Edupaz works, where diverse struggles – largely indigenous, peasant and Zapatista – for land and territorial recuperation against neoliberal and extractivist projects combine with claims for self-determination and the recuperation of stolen dignity sets a rich context to analyse the benefits and challenges of such a project in terms of drawing conclusions for the political ecology study of environmental conflicts.

While feminist political ecologists and geographers have pointed out the relevance of “the emotional” in environmental conflicts, some have pointed out the ambivalent role of psychotherapy in framing subjectivities in compliance with neoliberal contexts (Bondi, 2005b). Yet what, exactly, psychotherapeutic approaches can contribute to discussions about the emotional challenges that environmental, peasant and indigenous struggles face in their collective processes of contestation lacks adequate exploration. The next section illustrates this gap and deepens my aims, followed by the methodological and case study grounding, which sets the stage for the following two sections. These show how psychotherapeutic work unfolds in a context of poverty, peasantry and indigenous rights claims in southern Chiapas. I then discuss the subversive potential of GT in terms of political action, while also considering the weaknesses of an emotional reflexivity that insufficiently connects everyday experiences with broader political processes. I conclude by reflecting on academic and action-oriented implications of this study.


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2. The Psychotherapeutic Gap in Political Ecology: Politics, Subjectivities and Healing

Political ecology is increasingly incorporating the analysis of the self, consciousness, subjectivities and emotions to better understand environmental conflicts (Nightingale, 2011a; Sultana, 2015). While the material and biophysical dimensions are important to frame environmental conflicts, this work shows how emotions also mediate conflicts over resources: practices and processes for land or natural resources control are negotiated through the (de-)constructions of (emotional) subjectivities embedded in power relations, influenced also by history, class, culture, religion, gender etc. The analysis of subjectivities enables the understanding of how people are continuously formed by and brought into relations of power, but also how they feel, act and embody resistance (as I explained in Chapter IV). This “emotional turn” in political ecology implies engaging with challenging questions about subjectivities, echoing broader debates about the subject, agency and power in the framework of post-structuralist discussions. Feminist political ecologists have problematised the definition, production and contestation of (gender) subjectivities within and around the governance of environments and livelihoods (Elmhirst, 2011). Subjectivities are not understood as essential products, contained within the body or the psyche, but emerging relationally in specific contexts (Nightingale, 2013). This relational understanding of the self is also advanced by the emergence of “emotional geographies”, which understands emotions mediated by socio-spatial relationships and as “connective tissues that link experiential geographies of the human psyche and physique with(in) broader social geographies of place” (Davidson and Milligan, 2004: 524). For example, anxiety and suffering can be key emotions that daily shape subjectivities in conflicts (Sultana, 2015). Subjectivities are also framed by practices and relationships to others via action or labour (like farming, caring, painting), facilitating the emergence of collective subjectivities, although this does not imply that they are unitary, stable or identical (Butler, 1997; Nightingale, 2011a, 2013).

Political ecologists interested in “the interior life of politics” – that is to say, the “dimensions of political activism that are rooted inside of us as individuals...our emotions, psychological development, souls, and passions, as well as our minds”, Pulido (2003: 47) – have showed how emotions can be triggers as well limiting factors for initiating and sustaining mobilisation. The mobilisation of individuals and collectives struggling to defend themselves, their livelihoods and cultures against imposed state or private appropriation implies in many cases processes of rupture, where subjects struggle for being sovereign over their territories, lives and also their subjectivities. Emotional bonds between themselves and with their sites of resistance (Bosco, 2007), socialisation via spirituality (Dallman et al., 2013) and popular education (Kane, 2010) can be crucial for maintaining cohesion and networks for social movements. However, also, people can be paralysed, depressed and even commit suicide due to their feelings of guilt, shame and fear when facing (housing) dispossession (García-Lamarca and Kaika, 2016).


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Among psychology and affiliated sciences, political ecologists and geographers have shown interest in using psychoanalytical ideas or methods for understanding human-environment relationships (Pile, 1991). Prime examples include attempts to understand how subjects are formed in relation to nature through employing psychoanalytic concepts such as signifiers and desires, predominantly inspired by the work of Jacques Lacan (Sletto, 2008; Robbins and Moore, 2013). Foulcauldian and Butlerian understandings of subjectivities are also common in political ecology (Nightingale, 2006; Paulson et al., 2003). Nevertheless, all tend to consider that processes of subjectivation are ungraspable for the subject. This may be the reason why political ecologists have under-explored the political role that self-reflexivity – reflecting about one’s own subjectivation process – can play in fostering or hindering subjectivation itself. For Butler, “giving account of oneself” (2005, 1997) implies at the same time opportunities for subordination and resistance. In relation to this, my research in this chapter acknowledges the omnipresent presence of power in subject formation, but also explores to what extent GT can overcome deeply interiorised subjectivities, or “free thought from what we silently think” (Foucault, 1990: 9).

In this chapter I assess and analyse the impacts that GT has upon indigenous and peasant activists, with the aim of fostering new insights for better understanding “the subjective” and “the emotional” in political ecologies. Created by Fritz and Laura Perls in the 1950s, GT is an existential/experiential form of psychotherapy which seeks to increase consciousness and reflexivity of the subject’s “here and now” and reflect upon responsibility, understood as response-ability, that is as the need of the individual to accept the present experience and decide how/if they want to take action regarding the issues analysed. GT is inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis, but in being closer to humanistic-existential schools of thought it also incorporates other perspectives and “technologies” such as theatre and Zen Buddhism form of confrontation (Peñarrubia, 1998). The well-known Chilean Gestalt practitioner Claudio Naranjo aims to “democratise psychotherapy” by expanding its benefits to all sectors of society especially by incorporating Gestalt practice into pedagogy (Keck, 2015). GT, generally speaking, is considered more “horizontal” than psychoanalysis as it emphasises the relational constitution of the self, which is self-discovered, instead of interpreted (as usually happens in psychoanalysis). My research is not the first attempt to combine psychotherapeutic practice with geographical issues (see Bondi, 2005a, 2014). But, while Bondi has discussed how the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapies contributes to the understanding of peoples’ relational experiences of place and space by emotional geographies, my research is more action-oriented inspired. I seek to understand how the practice of psychotherapy, specifically GT, can be useful for grassroots activists engaged in environmental conflicts.

Several researchers have reported on the benefits of individual and collective therapeutic accompaniment in (post-)conflict and violent situations. Community, social and popular psychology has proved to be useful for working upon the stress and fear, sadness, anger and low self-esteem that individuals and communities face after military interventions, massive


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assassinations and human rights violations (Beristain and Riera, 1993; Martín-Baró, 1986). Of course, “political healing” does not necessarily need external aid, since movements and communities themselves also facilitate mutual listening, processes of remembering and reflexivity via their specific practices (Middleton, 2010; Brown and Pickerill, 2009a). However, GT’s malleability (using several performative techniques that can adapt to culturally specific forms), its focus in intersubjectivity and its commonalities with the “pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire, 1970/2010) – in which subject themselves build and understand their own history/histories and place(s) in society – can shed light towards the role that individual and collective consciousness plays in (environmental) mobilisations.

On the other hand, several authors have criticised psychotherapeutic practices as ways to “govern the soul” and the celebration of the individual in a capitalist society (Rose, 1999). While GT implied a revolutionary way of doing therapy in the 1960s, some argue that this revolution remained only in psychology, maintaining a conservative perspective in political terms (Agel, 1971). As is true of most individual or group psychological interventions, GT participates of the capitalist market of therapy and its clients are largely medium-upper classes of western urban societies. Bondi (2005b), however, insightfully argues that criticisms to psychotherapy have been mostly done based on “textual sources” (Rose, 1999), and that psychotherapy can both contribute to and resist neoliberal subjectivities and forms of governance. Also, criticisms of psychotherapy have been mostly contextualised in neoliberal contexts and societies. The case analysed here is markedly different: I analyse a concrete group therapeutic intervention from the voice of its “users”, and in a context where subjectivities are pushed towards neoliberalism, but where conflict, violence and peasant/communitarian/anti-capitalist logics have a significant role in shaping subjectivities. How GT adapts, contributes or resists those dynamics is something I will discuss later on.

3. Edupaz’s Gestalt Therapy Workshops and the Context of their Emergence

3.1 Methods

I spent two months (August to October 2015) as an active participant-observant of Edupaz, interviewing their staff (5) and two group therapists as well as conducting 23 interviews and three “performative” focus groups with members of indigenous39 and peasant communities that participated in GT workshops between 2004 and 2014 (Table V.1). These workshops were inspired by Naranjo’s training for psychotherapists named SAT (Seekers After Truth); Edupaz called them “SAT Maya- Healing the Heart” (SAT-HTH hereafter). Workshops were 6 days-long, intensive and retreat-based, where participants identified and analysed their own set of beliefs framed during their lives by means of an eclectic array of practices from spiritual and

39. Maya people, mainly Tojolabal (in the Border Region, near Guatemala) and Tzotzil and Tzeltal (in the highlands of Chiapas). Interviews with Tojolabal were in Spanish, since the process of colonisation has eroded Tojolabal language and culture. When interviewing Tzotzil and Tzeltal, I worked with local translators when needed.


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psychological traditions and disciplines, like meditation, body work and movement, theatre, peer and group therapy. These practices attempted to cultivate a conscious attention to the process of the relational construction of the self, aiming to lessen the identification with personalities and freeing the subject to explore new ways of thinking, feeling and doing (Keck, 2015; Naranjo, 2013). Edupaz initially directed workshops towards indigenous leaders, defined as those who have any kind of active role in their community, such as participating in the social work of the church dedicated to indigenous spirituality (Iglesia Autóctona), land and environmental issues (Pastoral de la Tierra), health or education commissions of Zapatistas Communities, or involved in land struggles and others. Dissemination of the workshops happened also through word of mouth among participants and their relatives. Edupaz asked self-selected workshop participants for 250 Mexican pesos ($13 US) to cover part of the expenses of the 6 day-long workshop, with in-kind payment (e.g., corn and beans) also possible. Remaining funding was provided by Edupaz, via the economic surplus of annual psychotherapeutic trainings for professionals, and the Claudio Naranjo Foundation. Therapists worked on a voluntary basis in order to enrich their training, in several cases coming from Spain.

Table V.1 Main data collection strategies used during fieldwork in southern Chiapas (Mexico)

Interviews with SAT-HTH workshop attendants

Interviews with Edupaz workers

Interviews with therapists in workshops

“Performative” focus groups

Number

23

5

2

3

Participants Characteristics

13 women. 10 men. Indigenous and peasants participating in the social work of the church; land and environmental issues or involved in land struggles via Zapatismo or peasant organisations

2 men, 3 women

Therapists came from Spain on a voluntary basis

Same as interviewees. Total attendees: 18 (4+ 6+ 8)

Locations

Around Comitán de Dominguez, Comalapa, San Andrés Larrainzar, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Huixtán

Comitán de Dominguez

Via e-mail

San Andrés Larrainzar, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Huixtán

Other Characteristics

Psychotherapeutic practice in my interviews (rapport; self-exploration and reflection of the interviewees)

Semi-structured interviews and informal talks

5-hour-long workshops: collective discussion, corporal movement meditation and peer-to-peer listening


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From around a total of 300 workshop participants between 2004-2014, selected interviewees (23) were contacted by Edupaz or partner organisations, or through contacts given to me by fellow workshop participants (snowball sampling). My interviewees had a diverse profile, but many of them would refer to themselves as luchadores sociales (translated as “social activists”), therefore my use of the term “activists”. Since limiting my methods to interviews would provide me only “discursive” information about the psychotherapeutic experience, I decided to also develop “performative” focus groups (3), which included GT exercises, such as corporal movement via music, meditation, peer-to-peer listening and collective discussion. Although these workshops emulated the spirit of SAT-HTH workshops, they were obviously much lighter – given the challenges of time, resources and not having a team to develop a full programme – but they allowed me to better understand how my interviewees engaged in and gained from SAT-HTH workshops. I co-organised these focus groups with an Edupaz member, drawing on my own training (in course) as a Gestalt Therapist.

3.2 Emotional Support in Peasant-indigenous Chiapas: Liberation Ecologies and Edupaz The uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994 attracted local, national and international attention to the land inequality and abuses that rural, peasant and especially indigenous communities had historically faced in southern Mexico. Inspired by the agrarian reformer and commander of the Liberation Army of the South during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) Emiliano Zapata, 3,000 armed peasant and indigenous insurgents seized several towns in Chiapas on 1 January 1994, the day on which the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. The state deployed armed forces over several days of direct confrontation, and state violence continued via murdering, forced migration and disappearances, persecutions and tortures in subsequent years (FRAYBA, 2005). The consequences of this conflict also manifested in psychosocial terms: communities reported fear, worries, tiredness, anger, sorrow, discouragement and increased internal confrontations due to violence, uncertainty and rupture of shared symbolic and economic values (Pérez-Sales et al., 2002).

After 1994, the peasant movement, heterogeneously organised with the common and everyday struggle for land recuperation expanded, in some cases, to broader Zapatista claims beyond land access, such as health, self-determination, education, democracy and justice (Villafuerte et al., 1999). In Chiapas, similar to revolutions in several Central American countries in the 1960s (Moksnes, 2005), the Liberation Theology Church played an important role in the political empowerment of indigenous communities. This church, “enabling the combination of marxism and faith” (Edupaz member, 25.08.2015), seeks “the liberation of the poor by themselves, as organised historical agents, conscientised and linked to other allies who take up their cause and their struggle” (Boff, 1995: 67). Nowadays, land continues to be central in the socio-ecological dynamics of Chiapas. Land inequality has been addressed via institutional reforms and direct action such as peasant and Zapatista land occupations (Mattiace, et al.,


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2002). Land governance in Chiapas continues to be managed under a commons regime (see Rocheleau, 2015). In 2013, 75% of the population in Chiapas lived in poverty (SEDESOL, 2015). Many communities seek to stay as independent as possible of governmental support (Zapatistas or ideologically aligned with Zapatismo), others survive thanks to governmental and NGO projects. Many decide to search for labour opportunities in Mexico City, northern Mexico or the United States.

Besides peasant livelihood adversities, peasant and indigenous communities in Chiapas also face challenges to territorial sovereignty due to several environmental conflicts emerging from mining, hydroelectric projects, privatisation of land and water, deforestation and tourism (Otros Mundos Chiapas, 2015). These conflicts are driven by the insertion of Chiapas into the Mexican federal project of building a neoliberal export-based economy and by the “developmentalist illusion” that usually accompanies these projects such as the construction of roads, houses, installation of electric infrastructure and generation of productive projects. In 2015, Chiapas had 99 mining licenses for the extraction of gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, iron, titanium rod, tungsten and antimony, most of them for Canadian enterprises (El Financiero, 2015). Extraction also takes place by the generation of hydroelectric energy, as Chiapas generates 54% of the hydroelectric energy of the country implying the displacement of around 200,000 people since 1983 due to dam building (NDMX, 2016). These projects, which claim that growth and development will be stimulated by deregulating the economy and allowing the unhindered movement of international capital, are pushed by state and private companies and in many cases international NGOs. Many communities mobilise against these projects, since they “impact all spheres of life: culture, the vital space, food, water, sacred areas, landscape, health...that is, the possibilities to fully enjoy life” (Otros Mundos Chiapas, 2015) and seek to gain sovereignty over the collective management of their common resources (Rocheleau, 2015). However, resisting extraction takes a big toll; local leaders and activists have been threatened or murdered or their rights violated (FRAYBA, 2005).

Before 1998, when Edupaz formally consolidated as an NGO in Chiapas, most of their members were engaged to social-communitarian and/or ecclesiastic work, in solidarity with refugees that escaped from the Guatemalan armed conflict (1960-1996) and sympathetic with “the resistance” (Zapatistas). Initially, Edupaz’s work was supported, in economic, infrastructure and ideological terms, by the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas. Samuel Ruiz, a follower of the Liberation theology who was Bishop from 1959-1999, was key for setting and maintaining the Church’s theological principle of “preferential option for the poor”. Edupaz develops its work mainly in the frontier regions of Chiapas with Guatemala, and occasionally in the high plateau area, working at three levels: solidarity economy, agro-ecology and holistic health. All of them include the transversal aim to increase women’s participation in household and community decision-making processes. Edupaz’s work in holistic health develops diverse alternative health treatments, giving relevance to traditional Mayan healing ceremonies. Nowadays, Edupaz is financed by agencies such as Catholic Relief Service and International Development Exchange.


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After the Zapatista uprising in 1994, members of Edupaz identified social decomposition and internal conflicts in communities due to counter-insurgence mechanisms used by the Mexican state to isolate and dismantle rebel communities by offering them access to productive projects such as Procampo, Oportunidades, Procede. These projects imply grants for credits in public development banks, acquiring fertilisers and agricultural machinery and selling products through governmental marketing chains (Dietz, 1996). Edupaz’s approach to this situation takes a step forward from liberation theology to liberation psychology, inspired by Martín-Baró’s work in El Salvador where psychology was connected to individual and collective liberation. In 2004, one founding partner of Edupaz, trained as a Gestalt psychotherapist, started co-organising intensive GT workshops titled “SAT Maya-Healing the heart”:

“The aim of these interventions is to face the incoherencies of organisations, especially those related to the difficulties of community representatives to take care of themselves and their families, to hear and attend community demands...related to health issues and in relation to uneven gender relationships” so that they can “see our [their] own heart and realise how we alone are enslaving our selves...and see that the villain is not only outside, but also inside, in the way they treat their wives, sons and daughters, in the way they choose to be represented” (Edupaz member, 04.08.2015).

Naranjo’s GT SAT workshops take place worldwide, especially for psychotherapists, teachers and social workers that can afford it. Developing workshops in a poor and peasant society implied a step forward towards Naranjo’s democratisation of psychotherapy, fulfilling his will that everybody (beyond psychiatric, economic and professional labels) can access and benefit from emotional support and reflexivity. For Edupaz, peasants and indigenous individuals “usually do not have access or knowledge about how to improve their emotional health” (Edupaz member, 25.08.2015) and thus they are to be considered as rightful participants of this inclusive paradigm. Nevertheless, there were several challenges in terms of how to adapt the contents of the workshops, given language difficulties (therapists were Spanish speakers while some attendants could understand but hardly speak Spanish), illiteracy and how to make the concepts beneath the theory easy to grasp, as one therapist leading one workshop told me.

4. Re-building Individual, Relational and Participatory Selves/Subjects

According to many workshops’ participants, SAT-HTH workshops enabled them, for the first time, to reflect, write (themselves or with the help of others) and narrate their own life story. This is not a minor achievement, since possessing and narrating one’s life is not a given, and in fact implies “to situate oneself and to be situated in dialogue with society” (McGranahan, 2010: 768). Having the chance to share these stories sets a new scenario, as does having the possibility to reflect “about things that we had never thought about”, and importantly, to express them. One workshop participant expressed this as follows: “Here [in Chiapas] we swallow everything and do not express…there [in the workshops] we could express everything we wanted to” (13.08.2015).


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When asking participants about the ways in which workshops made them understand how their life-stories shaped their subjectivities, several interchanged memories of the toughness of child labour, usually accompanied by physical or sexual abuses (mostly women). As a woman that now participates in the church’s land and environmental social work [Pastoral de la Tierra] expressed in tears:

“[my family] did not let me sit down, play, it was just work...It was good because I learnt how to labour the land…but my dad always beat me and my parents argued because of me, because my mum said «why do you oblige her to work so much»…and he said that my duty was to turn over the land in the corn field” (13.08.2015)

Several women shared a perceived disdain from their parents for being a woman (“my father treated my male brothers better…he did not want me, he wanted to have a boy”), considered less capable for labouring on the land. In the workshops, the inter-subjective process of expressing oneself and listening to others facilitated this consciousness. Reflection upon their and others’ life stories helped them to be aware of the way in which their subjectivities were built by the combination of their personal, family and socioeconomic implications of being landless. This is how a Tzeltal man, former member of the EZLN, now working with the Indigenous Church, expressed it:

“I realised how my heart was like…searching for a revenge…I could not find my place, I have been always against the government and those who exert power… but I did not know why, I was very anxious about that, and I did not understand why…and now I understand there is a lot of injustice, in my life too… My father died when I was a child, and when I was eight I began working on coffee plantations...Labour was extremely hard for me, and there my heart got full of hatred… I hated everyone” (10.09.2015).

While gaining knowledge about themselves individually, workshops also shed light on how their subjectivities shape and influence their family and community conflicts at present. Participants of the workshops expressed great appreciation of performative experiences such as dancing, movement and especially theatre as ways to better understand their personal challenges when relating with others:

“...by moving and [focusing attention on] breathing it is like anger moves and I can have more strength….[in the theatre] in a scene, I played a son, another one played my dad, another my mum…that’s how I realised that my dad had mistreated me….and that explains why I do not have the courage to defend my land or to participate in meetings…I always remain silent” (Tzeltal man, 10.09.2015)


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While being able to analyse, understand and share one’s own life story is a very big step towards posing in oneself the connections between a relational and a systemic dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013), benefits of the workshops clearly went beyond reflexivity. Some participants shared how, after the workshops they slowly gained confidence to participate in community meetings. As a woman participating in Pastoral de la Tierra, put it:

“I have even dared to speak out, because here women almost do not speak. In the commons [Ejidal] assembly or neighbourhood meetings, before, when I saw something I did not like, I did nothing. I felt anger or fear, sometimes I ended up yelling, for the anger of not being able to express myself, I wanted to say a lot and I could not. Now I take my time and can express my view better” (13.08.15).

As expressed by this woman, most of the female interviewees reported daring to participate more actively in assemblies after the workshops. This is remarkable in a context where women are not the owners of land and tend to be absent in community meetings, showing how psychotherapy can work at the service of feminist considerations of household politics and gender as sites of political intervention. As one of the facilitators of Edupaz’s GT weekly workshops with women stated: “it is too pretentious to consider this an engine of social change…we would need a multidisciplinary approach… But women like to participate in these groups...they explore expressing themselves, moving beyond their always receptive role… of TV, of husband and family necessities” (07.09.2015, my italics).

SAT-HTH workshops set challenges for indigenous men too, helping them to channel fears and insecurity towards speaking out in gatherings. Some of them also reported benefits of cultivating care and nurturing their equals, an emotional labour that transforms the experience of both givers and receivers. As a male peasant told me:

“...people can come to me and ask to talk, to dance, to give a massage…and people tell me they are better off then…I never thought I could do that... never thought I could help or take care of someone and now I feel I can” (12.09.2015).

5. Limits to Action: Situating the Self but Disconnecting from Context?

Many interviewees, as well as Edupaz workers, expressed their concern about communities being divided especially due to the recent entrance and clientelist practices of political parties. Community division increases because of the conflicts between those who seek to obtain governmental projects (mainly through Partido Revolucionario Institutional and Partido Verde Ecologista parties) and autonomous households and communities “in resistance”. Religious differences also cause conflicts. For Edupaz, many of these conflicts are incited by the Mexican state, seeking to isolate rebellious communities. Edupaz proposes addressing conflicts by improving internal relationships.


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“Maybe the worst event related to this was the Acteal killing, in 1997, where paramilitary indigenous people killed their brothers and sisters, probably with the support of the national government. In order to prevent a new Acteal we realised the need to give space for them to say all they need to say, so that they can understand and live in diversity and difference” (Edupaz member, 04.08.2015).

Communities themselves also identify difficulties in how to deal with their individual and collective emotional problems, that, when not faced directly, give rise to rumours and gossip, straining communities internally. As one participant expressed it:

“In our communities and our movements, we sometimes talk about things that have nothing to do with our interests…producing more lies that divide us… and instead of resolving problems we end up hitting each other more and destroying all we created” (08.09.2015).

Although the promotion of individual and collective reflections regarding activism was not one of the explicit aims of SAT-HTH, workshops spontaneously enabled such reflections among the attendants. Several interviewees shared how the individual and collective emotional reflexivity fostered in SAT-HTH workshops fed their thoughts about activism. For example, an interviewee who participated in the autonomous municipality Tierra y Libertad explained how workshops were useful for reflecting on the importance of horizontal and responsive leadership:

“We do not want leaders that only say and do, and people obey…Through these workshops, local leaders can understand that they have to be more helpful and comprehensive with the people…that it is the people who have to benefit, not them” (09.09.2015).

Since workshops developed by expressing and hearing diverse experiences of participants as equals, attendants could reconsider the significance of their activism. A member of a youth commission at the local church and involved in agro-ecological projects, explained it as follows:

“A group of us wanted to reforest an area, but many people [in the community] showed no interest, seemed to be only interested in money… [Workshops] helped me to understand that we are not going to change everything, that is not going to be perfect…and that people have different thoughts and emotions… humans are not puppets, I am never going to make others think the same as me” (17.08.2015).

In that sense, several interviewees report that workshops served to digest their own emotions regarding collective issues and maintain themselves active in movements. As one former member of the Peasant Organisation Emiliano Zapata (OCEZ), explained:


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“I was able to share in the workshop how I felt betrayed by my colleagues, my best friends, my brothers [movement comrades], that accused me of stealing some cows…and I decided to withdraw from there, I did not feel like continuing…and then I decided to get into formal politics, that was a mistake…and I quit...but with all this I thought that everyone hated me…then during the workshop, I realised that it was not true, I dared to talk to them and I saw how people answered me with such a healthy voice, the people with whom we had occupied and gained lands!!…I could be with them again” (08.09.2015).

In that sense, workshops fostered intra-community participation and helped maintain cohesion among the dispossessed, beyond their differences. However, as I mentioned before, violence in Chiapas cannot always be managed through community relationships. In fact, this last interviewee remembered how he was criminalised and imprisoned by the state for his direct action (recuperating land from landowners) and how the founder of OCEZ was assassinated in 1989. However, in SAT-HTH workshops, broader political issues were not systematically analysed or emotionally or performatively (gestaltly) explored. This is because Edupaz ascribed to the conventional program of Naranjo’s SAT workshops, a standardised program centred in self-knowledge, without allocating time for a collective reflection and action regarding social, political or ecological issues. Also, some Edupaz members raised doubts on the benefits of therapeutic interventions for broader social change, a fact that prevented emotional reflexivity from being further integrated into other areas of the organisation’s work. As one Edupaz member stated:

“how to reach to the heart of people if peasants have many other worries?!…It does not rain, harvests are not enough…” (09.09.2015).

I confirmed the limits of an isolated therapeutic approach – that is, without an engagement with the broader socio-political context – in one of the “performative focus groups” I co-organised with an Edupaz member in San Andrés Larrainzar. Several attendees expressed their worries as seeing themselves “fruitless”, as a metaphor meaning having bad crops and nothing to leave to their sons and daughters:

“land is no longer the same...we need a better economy to sustain our necessities...when there are many necessities, the sadness arrives...organic crops are good for the land but require a lot of work, enough for eating but not for selling...” (Tzoztil man, member of Zapatista community, 16.09.2015).

A SAT-HTH intervention would have probably tried to map how subjects’ beliefs, thoughts or feelings of “being fruitless” are and were structured in their inter-subjective daily relationships with family and close relationships. But, in our focus group, we sought to promote an environment to understand both feelings and context together, incorporating reflections on


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the liberalisation of agriculture via free trade agreements and the colonialism inside Mexican society that looks down on peasant and indigenous labour. Of course our brief words about this did not change their thoughts and feelings (which was not our intention in any case). But contextualising such feelings facilitated collective and peer-to-peer dialogues where participants shared not only their emotions, but also their strategies to manage their individual and collective response-ability for their feelings of dispossession, beginning, for example, from a practical issue: sharing strategies for overcoming rust plagues in coffee crops. We, however, lacked knowledge to collectively further analyse the feeling of “being fruitless” as connected to state politics and the struggles for a “fruitful” peasantry in local and national activist networks. This experience did point to how a therapeutic intervention could help raise consciousness and response-ability in the personal, relational and broader political realms, fostering “the liberation of the poor by themselves, as organised historical agents, conscientised and linked to other allies who take up their cause and their struggle” (Boff, 1995: 67).

However, SAT-HTH workshops and the GT framework did not facilitate an explicit consideration about the role of broader political contexts in shaping locals’ subjectivities. While increasing reflexivity, acknowledging subjectivation and increasing community participation have political implications, the potential political value of GT practice was under-exploited due to the lack of reflexivity about the role of broader political contexts in (emotional) subjectivities. In a situation where everyday experience is pierced by dispossession, violence and conflict, reflexivity about individual, family and community dynamics is useful, but still limited and not automatically connected with political empowerment.

6. Exploring Activists’ Subjectivities via Gestalt Therapy: Generative Spaces of Contestation or Therapy as Personal Politics?

The previous three sections illustrated how GT practice fits with relation to peasant and indigenous struggles for land, sovereignty/autonomy and human rights, interrelated with colonial and indigenous spirituality. The performative and inter-subjective practices of SAT-HTH workshops provided food for thought, feeling and movement of the complex “fluid” and “sticky” (Nightingale, 2011: 123) processes that constitute the subjectivities of the participants. Workshops also contributed in some cases, to push activists towards processes of “rupture” of established subjectivations, through performative experiments – dance, theatre, mediation – that helped them to intimately explore other practices of existence. This coincides with Bondi’s argument (2005b) that psychotherapeutic technologies help subjects to participate in their own governance rather than submitting to domination, and shares some similarities with other grassroots pedagogic projects that seek to transform subtle power relationships via a critical pedagogy for raising the consciousness and self-esteem of the oppressed (Kane, 2010). However, since SAT-HTH interventions were not totally embedded in the contextual violent geography where they develop, they also confirm Bondi’s (2005b) argument on the


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ambivalence of psychotherapeutic technologies. While the SAT-HTH labour in healing and strengthening individuals and communities is certainly relevant for the reproduction of biopower from below (Hardt, 1999), it also resonates with critics of communitarian autonomous projects or alternatives that do not engage with broader (power) issues (see Holloway, 2005). My analysis shows how GT increased subjects’ reflexivity about their own subjectivities and the opportunities of this to ease collective dynamics, showing how psychotherapy contributes to the construction of a private-public continuum of emotional expression. But, importantly, my study also helps to discuss the risks of fostering an emotional, but de-politicised, route to social transformation.

This case study shows how moving from psychoanalytic theory to consider psychotherapeutic practice can feed political ecological debates on subjectivities and emotions, providing an incipient understanding of the relationship between personal biographical social stories and the dynamics and disappointments which shape or generate political action (Kallio, 2016). Participants’ accounts of “giving account of themselves” illustrated the diverse and often contradictory ways in which contestations generate, persist or interrupt in everyday activists’ lives via “the multiple temporalities, spatialities and emotional registers at work in generating the political” (Featherstone and Korf, 2012: 663). The case also shows how GT facilitates an emotional reflexivity that increases activists’ understanding and possibilities of transformation of their processes of subjectivation. In that sense, while GT’s focus on individual subjectivities could be criticised as fostering an intensification of individual subjectivity (Bondi, 2005b; Rose, 1999), the emotional reflexivity in group exercises facilitated participants’ inter-subjective affective communication, feelings of equality and capacity for mutual listening. Although the implementation of an external and de-contextualised therapeutic technology could be criticised in terms of colonialism and top-down interventions, the phenomenological character of GT enabled “the political value of individual transformation” (Naranjo, 1995: 90) to occur.

Nevertheless, SAT-HTH workshops lacked a performative public space beyond individual, household and community therapeutics, and thus risks promoting a revolution locked up in the intimate and leaving broader political issues untouched. As Swyngedouw (2014: 132) remarks, “without a site, a place or a location, a political idea is impotent”. The politically generative activity of SAT-HTH workshops could thus be strengthened by explicit discussions around the political and contextual dimension of emotions. That is, where state, international markets, drug cartels and corrupt politics, etc. (i.e., “external villains”) are performatively (gestaltly) included as “characters” that have a powerful role in shaping local beliefs and subjectivities, even if expressed differently biographically. On the contrary, Edupaz’s workshops focused more on “relational dispossessions”, understood by increasing awareness of the limits of self-sufficiency and the condition of being relational and interdependent beings, rather than dispossession as the condition of enforced (structural) deprivations


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of lands, rights, livelihoods, desires or modes of belonging (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013). This de-contextualised therapeutic approach, risks concentrating too much on building harmonious households and resilient communities through a fantasy of being unaffected by broader questions of power, and thus reinforcing rather than challenging the shift of structural responsibility towards individuals and communities.

7. Conclusions

This chapter has pursued an under-explored connection between political ecology and psychotherapy, showing how peasant and indigenous environmental activism and resistance is a generative process that implies diverse scales of contestation, where the performative, the personal and the emotional play a role in shaping individual and collective subjectivities and actions. Evidence came from the analysis of the experience of Gestalt Therapy workshops for indigenous and peasant activists in southern Chiapas. The reflexivity promoted by group workshops increased the consciousness of participants’ character and relational subjectivities, allowing them to provide an account of themselves as relationally (and gendered) constructed subjects, but also as active subjects, whose subjectivities could be confronted. However, findings also point out that therapeutic work that does not explicitly address structural power dynamics and immediate context risks fostering an individualist and depoliticised reflexivity. The need for emotional self-reflection in contexts of research and activism has already been suggested by Pulido’s (2003: 51) assertion that “political activism... is also an exercise in creating and changing ourselves”. However, the “feelings of justice” (Wright, 2010) that can link political ecology and the “politics of consciousness” (Naranjo, 2013), in the search for synergies for activism and progressive change have to be further weaved. How to create accessible and sustainable interventions for radical liberation ecology-psychology work for attendants, therapists and movements is a significant challenge, and something that would need further research, practice and collective discussion.


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To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities,

to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.

Rebecca Solnit

VI. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

VI. Discussion and Conclusion

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1. Introduction

In this chapter, I present a summary of the main empirical findings and discuss how they contribute to relevant scholarly debates as well as to the real life politics of socio-environmental movements. I first provide an overview of my empirical findings, highlighting three ways in which emotions interplay in environmental conflicts: emotional environmentality, emotional oppression and emotional environmentalism (Section 2). Rather than being isolated dynamics that occur independently, my empirical cases show that these emotions are simultaneous, contradictory and creative forms that feed power relationships in environmental conflicts. This depicts a constantly unresolved tension among the role of emotions as both channels for the subversion to hegemonic power (i.e., political subjectivation) and their role in reproducing hegemonic power dynamics (i.e., disciplined subjectivation). In Section 3, I argue that acknowledging this tension offers political opportunities both for movements and for political ecologists as an entry point to better understand and transform power asymmetries in environmental conflicts. In Section 4, I reflect on some of the limitations of this study as well as on possible avenues for future research. Section 5 synthesises my contribution towards political ecology’s understanding of environmental conflict, where I conclude by inviting political ecologists to explore new conceptual, methodological and action-research strategies.

2. Three Roles for Emotions in Environmental Conflicts: Emotional Environmentality, Emotional Oppression and Emotional Environmentalism In seeking to answer the main Research Question posed in this thesis, What role do emotions play in the politics of environmental conflicts?, my empirical cases show three main forms in which emotions intermingle with power relations in environmental conflicts: emotional environmentality, emotional oppression and emotional environmentalism. In the following subsections (2.1, 2.2, 2.3) I describe these roles in detail, explaining how they result in strengthening or interrupting capitalist and extractivist projects, facilitating or hindering the politicisation of subjectivities and actions. Figure VI.1 serves as an initial visual explanation to locate these three roles in relation to the theoretical framework proposed in Chapter II (see Figure II.3), specifically in relation to the vertical axis “Emotions that foster/hinder politicisation of subjectivities and actions”.


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Figure VI.1. Three main roles for emotions in environmental conflicts in the two case studies presented



EmotionalOppression

Emotional Environmentality

The political

The geographical

The social

The more-than-human

The psychological

Emotional Environmentalism

2.1 Emotional Environmentality

Emotions can be effective facilitators for capital accumulation, since they can be incorporated and strategically used to push disciplinary and hegemonic (territorial, extractivist) projects. My research in southern Chile shows how emotions are constitutive of the programmes of state and private enterprises that “accumulate through disciplining”, where the educational campaigns, negotiations and extortions to prevent fires revealed how extractivism consciously, strategically and deliberatively designs strategies for disciplining subjectivities and ensures the continuity of their extractivist project. Emotional compensations or “painkillers” (such as offering football pitches or hairdressing services) are strategies for the state and private sector to convince locals of the benefits of living in between tree plantations, and thus encouraging that locals engage emotionally with the project of building Chile as an extractive “forestal country”.


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In bringing the role of emotions into our understanding of the establishment of concrete environmental forms of government, my research expands the ways in which political ecologists usually use Foucault’s theory of discipline, governmentality and biopolitics. Several political ecologists have criticised the “utopian” aspects of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005) and extractivism (Andreucci and Kallis, 2017; Svampa, 2011), showing how they come to be associated with narratives of improvement and the education of habits, aspirations and desires (Li, 2007). While this work is useful for understanding that imposing spatialities implies also the imposition of concrete forms of political thinking (Dikeç, 2012), it does not take into account if and how imposed modes of “spatial-political feeling” play a role in those. Scholars closer to emotional and affect geographies, such as Thrift (2007, quoted in Pain, 2009) and Woodward and Lea (2010), have drawn attention to states using “affective contagion to control emotions and establish political and moral authorities” (Pain, 2009: 478). However, this work does not concretely show how these processes take place in emotional terms. In that sense, my work brings in something innovative, showing specifically how emotions are captured by or inserted into narratives of environmental, extractivist discipline.

I agree with Singh (2013) when she argues that governmentality and environmentality studies (Agrawal, 2005) have underexplored the role that emotion, affect and the body have in the constitution of individual and collective subjectivities. However, differently to Singh, my study in Chile does not analyse “environmentality” versus “emotion, affect and body”, but shows how affect (or emotions in my terms) may indeed be a useful path towards discipline. Like Mathew’s (2005) discussion of the way ignorance and complicity are relevant to understanding how the Foucauldian tandem power/knowledge operates in forestry governance in Mexico, my work shows how looking at daily emotional encounters expands our understanding of how biopower functions. My research confirms that “the production of new sources of faith and enchantment is crucial to the dynamics of the capitalist economy” (Konings, 2015), since the management and control of locals’ love, anxiety, anger and desire are core to the process of subject-making in hegemonic environmental regimes. Understanding this can provide political ecologists with a sharper understanding of the scope of environmentality dynamics in governing the self – as well as help understanding and further considering in their research – individuals and communities engaged or attached to extractivist projects even if they can be critical or made worse-off because of them. 2.2 Emotional Oppression I carried out my research in sites where environmental conflicts are associated with violence, territorial dispossession and racial and ethnic exclusions. These conflicts have emotional consequences on individuals, households and communities, who can also internalise and reproduce those emotional impacts; this is what I name here “emotional oppression”, associated to the politics of environmental dispossession, coercion and violence,


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and to racial, ethnic, class, gender/sexual and other systemic violence. My research in southern Chile shows how forestry extractivism depends and expands not only through emotional environmentality (explained in section 2.1), but also through the circulation of feelings of powerlessness and by states and companies “trampling upon” the dignity of locals. Similarly, in Chiapas, environmental organisations, Zapatistas and other civic societies (including Edupaz) denounce how capitalism, colonialism and extractivism expands thanks to the negation of the dignity of indigenous and peasant communities. Contributing to the studies that analyse the emotional and subjective impact that living in environmentally degraded and extractive environments have on local populations (see Anderson, 2009; Albretch, 2011; Campbell 1997), my work shows that environmental conflicts imply present and trans-generational suffering, which political ecologists could report and denounce more thoroughly (Sultana, 2011, 2015). But, more than this, my work also points towards considering this suffering as a facilitator of the expansion of hegemonic projects directed at nature. Imposing sorrows, silences, historical and intergenerational trauma (Mitchell and Maracle, 2005) or the “lack of dignity” onto individuals, communities and whole peoples shows how emotional oppression is at the service of extractivist agendas, or, conversely, how extractivist agendas result in and benefit from environmental and emotional oppression.

My work also reflects upon the internalisation and reproduction of emotional oppression, as my findings in Chiapas show. Abuses, abandonments and unresolved family and communitarian conflicts in sites of structural poverty and environmental conflict are incorporated, differently, onto the self; a self that can also reproduce emotional oppressions in its interrelationships in the dynamics of collectives, families and households. My research in Chiapas calls for an understanding of oppression as reproduced in personal, biographical stories (Kallio, 2016) where families, groups and other social structures in society, consciously and unconsciously, can serve to reproduce the social values of capitalism, patriarchy and authority. Interpersonal interactions in families and groups need, therefore, to be considered as “the psychic agents of society” (Fromm, 2001).

In reaction to such emotional oppression, my two cases report different strategies for resistance: sovereignty in the case of Chile, liberation in the case of Mexico. In southern Chile, local communities defend the right to maintain their anger, their sorrow and their memories associated to tree plantations and emotional and spiritual attachments to their territories versus what companies and the state want them to see, know and feel. While local communities surrounded by tree plantations receive promises of happiness if they are willing to live their lives “in the right way” (Ahmed, 2010), their collectively expressed anger and sorrow helps them remember how they actually want to live. In Chiapas, where liberation theology fits well with indigenous claims for the recuperation of dignity, reflection through emotional subjectivities via Gestalt psychotherapy practice can be useful, if contextualised, as a way to acknowledge the internalised mechanisms related to emotional, environmental and relational oppressions.


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In analysing and engaging with these two strategies of resistance (sovereignty and liberation), my work shows that when talking about oppression, the emotional, the environmental and the relational are all intermingled. This show us that we need to consider environmental struggles as struggles for sovereignty and liberation; not only of land, resources and political and decision-making structures but of subjectivities, memories and emotions. That is, the struggle of values usually present in environmental conflicts (Martínez-Alier, 2002) are not only cognitive, but also about what people desire and love (Velicu, 2015), and in particular, according to my research, about how people want to live out their individual and collective (psychological, more-than-human, social, geographical and political) emotions. This helps us to move towards the next category that emerges from my work.

2.3 Emotional Environmentalism

In analysing the role of emotions in fostering political subjectivities and mobilisation, my work helps to further understand the process of activist, environmentalist subjectivation40. I have engaged with the quotidian in territories of conflict, where the walks, meetings, rituals and workshops appeared as generative performances in the formation and the struggles of subjectivities in sites of conflict. My empirical findings show that daily emotional practices – or “the wonder of minor experiences” (Bennet, 2016) – function, for local communities, as inspiration to be engaged in and reflect upon their activism. Importantly, my research shows how the reported emotions are not merely cultural or non-material (see Fraser, 1995; Butler, 1998), but arise as engaged with the daily experience of living in territories of environmental struggles. In Chile, indigenous communities in a state of resistance experience and embody their emotional geographies of anger and sorrow in their daily encounters with the monotonous, dry and fruitless plantations that surround them. Also in Mexico, emotions are connected to the ecological or material characteristics of the territory, related to family abuses (above all to women and children) for not being male and of working age, power abuses in coffee plantations, physical and emotional wounds in the struggle for gaining lands, and so on. The relation between emotions and “material” and unequal resource access must be stressed, especially for those who (probably non-feminists) can see with suspicion this “emotional turn of political ecology” as postmodern, fluffy and apolitical.

While Jasper (2011) argues that a combination of so-called positive emotions (for example, hope) and negative emotions (for example, anger) are needed to sustain activism, my work expands this view by emphasising the political work that those emotions do. My research with the Mapuche communities in resistance shows how, although emotions such as anger and sorrow tend to be labelled as negative, considering the political work they do,

40. I am referring to “environmentalism of the poor” or popular environmentalisms, i.e., impoverished populations and social-environmental grassroots organisations struggling against the state or private companies that threaten their livelihood, health, culture, autonomy, etc. (Martínez-Alier, 2002, 2007).


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those emotions are positive resources for resisting land and water dispossession. In this way, my research brings ideas and discussions of trauma from queer and cultural studies towards political ecology studies, as posed by Ann Cvetkovich: “to depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than as its antithesis. It’s a search for utopia that doesn’t make a simple distinction between good and bad feelings or assume that good politics can only emerge from good feelings; feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation” (2012: 2). Also, my research in Chiapas stresses the historical formation of activist subjectivities, acknowledging the role of past experience when considering emotions, something that, as Pain (2006) argues, tends to be underexplored when the focus is on immediate sensations. Bringing attention towards personal life histories (Kallio, 2016; Paasi, 1991) can generate a better understand of how and why individuals, albeit sharing a collective political identity with others, differently react, engage or perform their position in contexts of conflicts.

My work also points to the relevance of spirituality, rituals and reflexivity in emotional environmentalism, which also tend to be underexplored in political ecology. My research in Chile shows how indigenous, Mapuche rituals act as a canalisation of emotions; Edupaz’s work in Chiapas pursues forms of social and communitarian intervention, combining Christian spirituality (for example, liberation theology) and indigenous (Maya) spirituality with psychotherapy. This calls for spirituality to be considered as a reflexive and performative process that builds individual and collective knowledge and action; that is, beyond concrete cultural practices, values or beliefs that give agency or a sacred identity to the “non-human” (see De la Cadena, 2010; Dallman et al., 2013; Swamy et al., 2003; Latta, 2014), spirituality is a resource that creates a power to assist the mobilisation efforts of activists (Pulido, 1998). The spiritual character of both Mapuche rituals and SAT-HTH interventions appears as a solid framework that enables activists to hold and express their negative individual and collective emotions in a way that encourages them, individually and collectively, to recognise their anger as well as “transform it into something better”, towards others and themselves (Pulido, 1998: 722). In this sense, my work first points to the transformative power of spirituality, recognising the political character of indigenous spiritual and affective politics; and second, in bringing the practice of psychotherapy as related to spirituality, my work encourages political ecologists to recover and critically question diverse cultural and spiritual practices that, in being spiritual, contribute to the political. In other words, practices that, as Laura Pulido puts it, offer “a connection with power(s) beyond ourselves,… [providing] tremendous strength and courage, not only to withstand suffering …. but the courage to change unjust situations, whether that means protecting those who cannot protect themselves (children, fish, landscapes), or rallying against immoral forces and structures, including patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and intolerance of sexual differences” (Pulido, 1998: 721).


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3. The Ambivalent Political Work of Emotions: Opportunities for Socio-Environmental Movements and Political Ecology Research Agendas Subsections 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 point to emotions being useful resources for incorporating individuals into capital accumulation projects, as well as providers of opportunities for the political subjectivation and mobilisation of movements. Nevertheless, emotional environmentality, emotional oppression and emotional environmentalism are not isolated dynamics that occur independently, but simultaneous, contradictory and creative roles in which emotions feed power struggles in environmental conflicts. My cases show that, while negative emotions can be entry points towards being governmentalised, or prevent participation in collective projects associated to individual and collective emotional difficulties and interpersonal conflicts, the expression of negative emotions in public can be useful for crafting collective political subjectivity and agency. This provides a glimpse of the mobile, porous and multiple emotional layers that inform, reproduce and interrupt “the political” in environmental conflicts; layers that when combined inevitably result in a constantly unresolved tension between the role of emotions as channel for the “subversion of hegemonic power” (i.e., political subjectivation) and their role in “reproducing hegemonic power dynamics” (disciplined subjectivation). In a nutshell, my work shows that emotions contribute, ambivalently, towards the reproduction and the subversion of hegemonic power.

Ambivalence is, as Butler argues, a fertile site for opportunities for subversion: “the subject is itself a site of this ambivalence in which the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency” (Butler, 1997: 10). Both self-organised, Mapuche political rituals in southern Chile and psychotherapeutic workshops in Chiapas (Mexico) point to an important contradiction: in the struggle against disciplinarisation (environmentality) and oppression, the feeling of individual and collective distress, which are associated with disempowerment, results nonetheless in political agency precisely because of the expression of such negative emotions. I therefore argue that acknowledging (and giving space to) the ambivalent political work of emotions creates the possibility of the practice of passionate political ecologies that let us better understand and transform power asymmetries in environmental conflicts. Since emotions can draw subjects in different, opposing or competing directions, as well as help bring individuals together under common spaces (of solidarity or coercion), the emotional is a space of ambivalence, power and conflict. Considering the politically ambivalent character of emotions offers opportunities to incorporate the political information that they provide towards our work and research as political ecologists.

Giving an account of the oppositions and mutual connections between the different roles of emotions in environmental conflicts offers possibilities to further understand the unresolved tension between the role of emotions as facilitators of subversion as well their role


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in the reproduction of hegemonic power. I have incorporated this perspective in Figure VI.2, where the coloured triangle represents the window of opportunity that the consideration of emotions as the expression of unstable, multiple ambivalences can offer to both movements and scholars. Drawing from my empirical cases, I will now explore the opportunities that this ambivalence concretely offers about (i) how to set scenarios for sharing emotions in contexts of mobilisation, and how to best exploit politically the workings of those spaces (a finding relevant for environmental movement politics); and (ii) where to best study the political relevance of emotions, acknowledging emotions’ private, public, individual and collective character (methodological and conceptual contributions).

Figure VI.2. Ambivalent roles for emotions in environmental conflicts and opportunities for activism and research



Emotional Environmentalism

EmotionalOppression

Emotional Environmentality


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(i) Politically inspiring spaces for sharing emotions in contexts of environmental mobilisation

The analysis of the different processes that facilitated the expression of emotions in the two case studies offers opportunities to discuss the advantages and disadvantages that different path(s) for social–ecological transformation offer to activists and political ecologists (see Barnett, 2012). I have summarised in Table VI.1 the different characteristics of the two processes that facilitate the expression of negative emotions in my two case studies. While in Chile the process that facilitates the expression of emotions is part of organic, indigenous self-organised political rituals and meetings, in Mexico, emotional expression appeared related to a structured, externally driven framework within a context of healing. From a political ecology perspective that values autonomous forms of grassroots organisation, the way in which Mapuche collectively mobilise their emotions to politicise their subjectivities, would probably be catalogued as more political than SAT-HTH workshops, which represent an external, “western”, even colonial form to tackle subjectivities with the aim of individual healing.

Nevertheless, my analysis of SAT-HTH workshops also revealed the political opportunities that Gestalt Therapy offered for activists, related to the performance of new subjectivities with the potential of shifting household and communitarian (power) relationships. In this sense, while my analysis of Mapuche’s self-organised political rituals shows the role of emotions in negotiating power “outwards” – mobilised communities and individuals and their relationships with the state, private sector, etc. – my analysis of psychotherapeutic workshops in Chiapas shows emotions being mobilised in negotiating power “inwards”, that is to say, for the negotiation of power relationships inside movements, households and individual subjectivities. This points to the double-sided and interconnected character of “the political” in environmental conflicts, where “implicit activisms” – “small-scale, personal, quotidian and proceeding with little fanfare” (Horton and Kraftl, 2009: 14) – mutually feed and connect with “grandiose” activisms. As Butler puts it, “social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are re-articulated” (Butler, 2000: 14).

Table VI.1 Different processes facilitate emotional expression in my two empirical studies

Different processes that facilitate the expression of “negative” emotions in two environmental conflicts Case study Mapuche self-organised political rituals Psychotherapeutic workshops (Chile) (Mexico) Framework Indigenous “Humanist”

Organisation Internally driven Externally driven

Aim Mobilisation (political) Healing

Emotional expression Collective Individual


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Nevertheless, how to productively connect the two sides of the emotional/the political in environmental conflicts remains a challenge, especially when trying to avoid, on the one hand, crafting collective emotional identities without political discussion (Laclau, 2005; Žižek, 2006), and on the other hand, the fact that the introspection of individual life may distract us from politics (Sharp, 2008). Combining the lessons of both cases suggests that politically stimulating scenarios for sharing emotions in a way that productively considers the emotional as a space of power and conflict should: (a) facilitate inter- subjectivity, mutual listening and the expression of disagreements, as well as consider emotions as relational, individual and collective, shaped through encounters between humans, non-humanities and systemic and material structures, and allow for different and conflicting visions; (b) promote reflexivity and consciousness in terms of power distributions as a way to give an account of individual and collective processes of subjectivation in relation to relevant social actors in the conflict and also offering possibilities for reflexivity on power asymmetries or conflict in the internal politics of movements; and (c) enable spirituality and performance, be it in the form of rituals41 or (public) performance (including demonstration, public events, etc.), in a way in which affective communication among attendants and their “spaces of activism” takes place organically.

In an ideal situation, these requirements should help to acknowledge, express, discuss and shed light on conflict, both in relation to the other social actors in the conflict (outwards) as well as to individuals and groups inside movements (inwards). Giving a (political) space to emotions within the politics of social movements does not mean a total abandonment of reason nor the establishment of restrictive “feeling rules” for social movements (Brown and Pikerill, 2009b: 34), but to constantly consider that emotions are part and parcel of embodied, rational deliberation, decision-making and motive-action processes (Nelson, 2013). This invites us to discuss and establish ways in which we can incorporate emotions as part of our collective discussions, facilitating channels for recognising, “expressing and making the best out of the transformational potential of emotion side-by-side with deliberative assemblies” (Zografos, 2015:193). Even though combining the requirements I propose looks like a good way for individuals and movements to acknowledge, express, discuss, decide and act in relation to the different dimensions that constitute their emotional, environmental and activist subjectivities, crafting such spaces (autonomously or with the aid of external facilitators) may not be easy, and in any case the political benefits of sharing emotions are unexpected, given “the multiple temporalities, spatialities and emotional registers at work in generating the political” (Featherstone and Korf, 2012: 663).

41. The relevance of rituals in social mobilisation has been acknowledged by social movements theorists (see Jasper, 2011), echoing the work of Durkheim, Goffman and Collins (see Rossner and Meher, 2014). However, the political work of rituals is an incipient line of research in political ecology (see Gezon, 1999; Moretti, 2007; Paul Durrenberger, 2008; Nightingale, 2011b; Fraser et al., 2014).


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(ii) Navigating the political relevance of emotions: moving in between the private and public, the individual and collective

While scholars such as Mouffe prefer to talk about passions rather than emotions since emotions, according to their logic, refer too much to the individual (see Ramos et al., 2014 interview to Chantal Mouffe), my work is closer to the understandings of Ahmed (2014), who defines emotions as connecting “skin” where the social, collective, individual and unconscious all come to be separated, connected and delineated. In fact, in my view it is the fact that emotions ambivalently move between the public and the private, the individual and the collective that inspires interesting discussions. Indeed, as Sultana (2011) says, considering the wide range of both private and public expression of emotions, and how they are differently expressed, it is crucial to understand the processes entailed in the formation of subjectivities. Nevertheless, how to wear, as researchers, the emotional lenses to navigate this connecting skin between the private and public, the individual and collective sets important challenges, and my work sheds light on how to do it.

Political ecologists interested in the role of emotions in environmental conflicts can benefit by researching emotions as both individual and collective, private and public (and their combinations, see Table VI.2 where I summarise the ways in which my research strategy combined those), which in turn generates a better grasp of the way emotions manifest produce, reproduce, contest and are a result of power relationships in environmental conflicts. My grasp of the psychological, the more-than-human, the geographical, the social, and the political dimensions of emotions was developed thanks to a varied methodological strategy that let me access a wide range of emotional expressions by means of individual and/or private interviews, “emotional workshops” and my participant observations of open, collective political rituals. Generally speaking, while the first provided me with a richer account of individual and peer-to-peer emotional reflexivity, the latter helped me grasp how movements craft unified, collective and emotional subjectivities for the work of resistance.

Table VI.2 Overview of how my different methods let me capture the different spheres where emotions materialise in contexts of environmental conflicts

Spheres where emotions manifest in contexts of environmental conflicts

Individual Collective Private Interview Interviews, talks and “performative” focus groups

Public Ritual, Demonstration Ritual, Demonstration


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Deploying multiple methodological strategies for the study of emotions in environmental conflicts sheds light on how emotions are generated, expressed and connected in individual and collective, private and public spheres. Paying close attention to how emotions are diversely expressed in different spheres is relevant, for example, in order to understand why private emotions may not be expressed in public (Sultana, 2011), how collective and public emotions serve to bond activists together (Brown and Pickerill, 2009b) and craft undisciplined subjectivities (Chapter IV), or how individual emotional subjectivities differently express conflict in collective sites (Chapter V).

This multiple strategy, thus, serves to unpack the “stock characters and standard scripts” (Robbins, 2012a: 208) of environmental conflicts. Since emotional environmentalism, emotional oppression and emotional mobilisation are omnipresent dynamics in power struggles over the environment, social actors in environmental conflicts are ambivalent, non-stable subjects, and thus subjects with different standpoints that do not always follow coherent thoughts, feelings and performance in different spheres of action and at different times. This implies that we need to have a broader understanding of how people engage in environmental conflicts, looking for ambivalent inconsistencies (Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992; Butler; 1997) between public–private and individual–collective spheres (Sultana, 2011; Nightingale, 2013) but also for mapping the relationships between, for example, individuals’ private–personal experiences in the past and concrete collective public-political performances in the present. This does not only sketch a more nuanced and complex conceptualisation of subjects in environmental conflicts, but also lets us comprehend the varied individual and collective emotional geographies of subjects made from an infinite diversity of interconnected and multi-dimensional reasons, reactions, memories and motivations that inspire individuals towards concrete thoughts, emotions and actions in precisely the concrete ways they do at the moment we meet them.

De-standardising subjects in environmental conflicts also implies expanding our consideration of the “multiple temporalities, spatialities and emotional registers at work in generating the political” (Featherstone and Korf, 2012: 663). Locating ourselves at the spot that the tension between the three roles of emotion offers us (the coloured triangle), enables a better understanding the optimistic–pessimistic tension introduced in Chapter II. From this vantage point, we can better understand subversion and the reproduction of hegemonic power as constant processes or struggle (Horton and Kraftl, 2009; García-López et al., 2017). My work invites political ecologists to further analyse the daily emotional logics and negotiations of extractivism/capitalist/neoliberal environmental regimes, which can help us better grasp the strategies used by state and capital to control land and subjectivities, and how people adapt and resist them. My work also invites the field of political ecology to further consider spirituality and self-reflexivity as resources for political subjectivation and activism, since my work emphasises the “therapeutic” work of mobilisation and activism, where healing, sovereignty, reflexivity and liberation can come together in the pursuit of more equitable environments.


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4. Limitations and Future Research

The overarching question that motivated this thesis, What role do emotions play in the politics of environmental conflicts?, is ultimately difficult to answer definitively. In dialogue with five bodies of literature and two different case studies, I have tried to answer the question from multiple perspectives. I started from a proposed conceptual framework for the study of emotions in environmental conflicts and I have sought to explore some gaps I found in my review, through creating a dialogue between theory and the new insights and reflections my case studies revealed. Because of the nature of this process and the openness of the research question, however, there are several aspects that I did not, or could not, explore in the analysis. In this section, I reflect on some of these limitations and on related avenues for further research.

4. 1 On the Nature of Emotions Although I began with what could be interpreted as a call for a multi-disciplinary conceptualisation of emotions (Chapter II), I found my particular conceptualisation of emotions to be limited. My work is clearly more influenced by feminist, emotional geographers and psychological/psychotherapeutic accounts of emotions than by affect and social theorists, since I have portrayed emotions as expressed by individuals and collectives, instead of ungraspable affects or broader sociological accounts of emotions. While I have undoubtedly overlooked other ways to conceptualise emotions as non-representational or non-expressed, my decision to focus on concrete, individual and collective negative emotions responds, first, to what I found in the field and, second, to my willingness to consider how “affective capacities of any body are signified unequally within social spaces of being and feeling” (Tolia-Kelly, 2006: 213).

In exploring the “psychological subject” (Pile, 2010) as the object of the emotional in environmental conflicts, my research brings the psy sciences closer towards the interests of political ecology. Nevertheless, my work is limited in the way I have reported and researched (and proposed methodologies to tackle) the different emotional, cognitive or psychological impacts that living in territories of conflict have for local communities. The continuation of this project by, for example, engaging further with critical psychologists and (mental) health epidemiologists could provide and expand our understanding of the “health impacts: mental problems including stress, depression and suicide”42 reported in environmental conflicts the world over. Engaging further psy sciences may open new paths for political ecologists such as (i) considering non Lacanian psychoanalytical understandings of the formation of subjectivities (see Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992), (ii) exploring further the tensions between ego (in psychoanalytical terms) and subjectivities (see Butler, 1997), and (iii) expanding our knowledge of the emotional information that bodies and the unconscious, cryptically, provide (Bondi, 2005a, 2014).

42. See the Environmental Justice Atlas, https://ejatlas.org/. [Last accessed 15.05. 2017]


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4.2 On the Scales of the Political My analysis of the role of emotions in terms of power struggles in environmental conflicts has, in concentrating on the consideration of subjectivities (the internalisation of power), left unexplored other ways in which power is exercised. My focus on emotions “from the ground up” does not aim to argue that the emotional is the only or most important form in which to uproot the oppressive character of asymmetrical power relations present in environmental conflicts; I have not tried to show how/if communities engaged in struggle are better-off “externally” in their environmental/land conflicts due to their collective expression of emotions – peasant and indigenous communities in southern Chile and southern Mexico are exposed to structural and historical conditions that shape consolidated forms of inequality and dispossession. The fact that the communities and grassroots organisations I engaged with insist on the horizontal character of movements and regard with suspicion verticality and representation also explains why I remained close to an analysis of the politics of movements with more interest in horizontal relationships, instead of considering how the emotional environmentalism of movements spreads to political practices articulated in new understandings of representation. Analysing how anger and sorrow are differently mobilised in different political contexts related to my cases – for example, at the collective of Mapuche Municipal Mayors43, in the State of Chile vs. Mapuche trials, or in the new indigenous candidate that Zapatistas plan to present for national elections in 2018 – could be further explored in order to expand my “tracking” of the how generative processes differently (and contradictorily) mobilise emotions. This attention to the political work of emotions can also be useful to understand and intervene in the aftermath of conflicts and post-conflict scenarios. The question of emotion and the different scales of power, the political and politics could also lead to further discussions on the risk of emotions being manipulated. I must admit that I have been more critical in my work towards the way in which emotions are manipulated by those better-off to control the subjectivities of those worse-off (emotional environmentality) rather than being critical about the risks of the manipulation of emotions within social movements. Although I could have explored political disagreements among different Mapuche communities, or the governmentality of Edupaz and the Liberation Church in Chiapas (see Bryant, 2002), this would have diverted the main research interest of this thesis.

4.3 Structural Issues: Gender, Class and Ethnicity

Even if this thesis is grounded in a broad feminist framework and has developed thanks to fieldwork in indigenous territories, my work does not explore in detail the differential emotional geographies in conflicts in terms of gender (Rodó-de-Zárate, 2012), class, race and ethnicity

43. See, for example, the Association of Municipalities with Mapuche mayors, www.amcam.cl [Last accessed 15.05. 2017].


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(Dallman et al., 2013; Middelton, 2015). For example, my western account of emotions such as anger and sorrow could be much further nuanced by the incorporation of indigenous categorisations of emotions, which indeed combine much better the personal, communitarian, geographical and the political when naming emotions related to environmental degradation (see Bacigalupo, 2007). I could also have discussed further different gendered emotions in the intersectional spaces of conflicts (Rodó-de-Zárate, 2012), or how emotions are differently socialised according to social class norms (Miller and Sperry, 1987). Why I decided not to do so has, also, a political justification. Emotions are still considered as relevant to the Other, associated to women and the indigenous, or as a privilege we can think of only once we have the important things resolved. In response to this, my work has tried to show how emotions are related to material extraction, dispossession and inequality, even if the (cultural) structures of patriarchy and colonialism may show “more easily” some subjects as emotional. In this sense, my refusal to consider emotions as associated to concrete identity invites scholars and activists to consider the universality of emotions, that is, beyond preconfigured presumptions and categories44, but, importantly, without entering into a universalist analysis of emotions that empties the political content of our movements (Thrift, 2008).

My analysis of how power moves through emotions in subjectivities sheds light on processes of negotiation in the context of indigenousness (Hill, 2008; Zografos and Kenrick, 2005) and gender relationships (Agarwal, 2001; Butler, 1990). This can inspire indigenous and decolonial scholars to consider the emotional affinities that facilitated the rise of indigenous governments in Latin America, as well as the contemporary challenges they now imply (Andreucci and Radhuber, 2015). My work also offers a new glance at the processes of negotiation in gender identities and transforming gender privileges related to the environment, showing how psychotherapy can work at the service of feminist considerations of household politics and gender as sites of political intervention, which could be further considered by feminist political ecologists and geographers interested in social transformations.

4.4 Concrete Contributions of my Research to Local Movements

In recent years, there have been calls in political ecology to move “beyond critique” towards inspiring socio-environmental change (see Braun, 2015). In practical terms, however, this is easier said than done. While this thesis started with the commitment to bring further attention to the role of emotions for political ecologists and movements, I am doubtful about how my concrete engagement with environmental, peasant and indigenous movements in Chile and Mexico has contributed to the latter.

44. Nightingale (2013) did it when she thought of talking about the emotional attachments in fisheries and people asked her: “are you sure?… Are you going to talk to fishermen about their feelings?” (personal communication, Nightingale, 2016).


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During this research I have had a constant feeling that I could do much more, which indeed has been an uncomfortable (although also inspiring) pebble in my shoes. I have a general feeling that my research and my diverse methodology has had a good impact locally: some of my interviewees told me that my interviews or workshops, my publications (in Spanish, see Annex 4) or the conversations and devolution of my insights facilitated either the visibility of local demands and everyday struggles and work, or a process of critical reflexivity for individuals and communities in resistance; “I am now posing questions to the elders of the territory, questions like those you asked me … and the elders’ answers are making me aware that they are happy with what we, the youngers, are doing in the territory”, a Mapuche friend told me in May 2017. However, engaging with the emotional as an initial research question made it difficult at some points to consider my research as having a localised political contribution. For example, for the time being, local communities in Chile keep writing to me to ask for support or information in relation to my research regarding water scarcity and political responsibilities of fires in industrial tree plantations, and not in relation to the emotional. Even if contributing to these topics was part of my positionality and ethics, it makes me also think about the difficulty of materialising the contribution when concerned with the emotional.

After my stay in Chiapas with Edupaz, I thought that I could try to design a “Praxis for Emotional Political Ecologies Notebook” where movements and communities could consult and elaborate for themselves a diverse array of tools and performative methodologies (inspired by decolonising methodologies, Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999), useful for working around the reciprocal relationship of emotional reflection and action (Freire, 1970/2010). This could be a further aspect of action–research to develop, but, in any case, ethical questions would need to be developed and collectively discussed since at some points I am doubtful whether bringing to light the emotions of dispossessed communities can, indeed, weaken communities, exposing the interior life of politics to those who are always attentive at appropriating them, including academics (Rodríguez, 2017). While I have done my best in not doing so, I also recognise my limitations given the incompatibilities between an individual PhD research agenda and the everyday collective struggles to survive in a territory.

5. General Conclusions

This thesis points to the usually unseen and undervalued political work that emotions do in environmental conflicts. I found that emotions play an ambivalent role in environmental conflicts, since they can act as channels for the subversion of hegemonic power in environmental activism, as well as the reproduction of hegemonic power dynamics via governmentality and social oppression dynamics. By combining conceptual, theoretical and empirical research, I have attempted to advance the emerging field of Emotional Political Ecologies (EmPEs). My critical review of feminist political ecology, emotional geographies, social and cultural anthropology, social psychology and social movements literature helped


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me generate a theoretical framework to consider and analyse the multiple dimensions of emotions and the interrelations among them, which I termed the psychological, the more-than-human, the social, the geographical and the political. The theoretical review also pointed to the need to explicitly consider how emotions foster or hinder political subjectivities and agency, as well calling the attention of political ecologists towards negative emotions, since positive, loving, caring engagements with nature (and in concrete forests) tend to receive more attention when analysing local communities’ motivations for action in environmental conflicts.

Analysing emotions such as anger, sorrow and powerlessness in sites of intense, long-lasting environmental conflicts in southern Chile and Mexico served to de-romanticise and de-standardise the emotional interior life (Pulido, 2003: 47) of environmental conflicts. While political ecologists tend to pay more attention to the role of local communities’ positive, loving, caring engagements with nature in motivating action in environmental conflicts, my research in southern Chile shows that the collective expression of emotions such as anger and sorrow towards monocultures and extractive landscapes feeds political subjectivities and agencies in resistance. My research in Chiapas (Mexico) discusses how these negative feelings related to violent environments intermingle with personal experiences of conflict, and ultimately shows that activists can benefit from self-reflexion over such emotions via Gestalt psychotherapy; however, I also discuss that healing interventions can better collaborate with the transformation of internalised power relationships related to emotional, environmental and relational oppressions if structural issues of power are explicitly included. While both empirical cases inspire reflections on the intimate relationship between personal, social and ecological alienation, my case study in Chiapas has incipiently brought together “liberation ecologies” (Peet and Watts, 2004) and “liberation psychologies” (Martín-Baró, 1986), reflecting on the ways in which the daily struggle of communities and activists to liberate themselves from the multi-dimensional impacts that environmental conflicts have for them.

My work points to the mobile, multiple and porous emotional layers that inform, reproduce and interrupt the political in environmental conflicts. Emotions can act as channels for political subjectivation, subverting hegemonic power by means of environmental activisms, as well as helping the reproduction of hegemonic power dynamics via govermentality and social oppression dynamics. I have argued that this ambivalence contained within the political work of emotions offers opportunities for scholars and movements to get a better grasp on power asymmetries in environmental conflicts. By considering the emotional as a space of power and conflict, movements can set politically productive spaces for sharing emotions in contexts of mobilisation and political ecologists can further consider the private and public, the individual and collective spheres of environmental conflicts and the unstable standpoints of the different social actors participating in them.


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My research contributes conceptually and methodologically to the way political ecologists research and engage in environmental conflicts. Considering emotions when analysing environmental conflicts does not mean we ought to disregard facts, materiality or rationality, but seeks to gain nuances in our understanding of them. In that sense, my work suggests a phenomenological attitude (Barnett, 2012; Featherstone and Korf, 2012) in researching environmental conflicts, placing more emphasis on understanding the ways in which shared and conflictual discourses and values on nature are constituted through ordinary, everyday thoughts, reflexions, feelings and practices and how these serve to reproduce, negotiate and expand emotional geographies in struggle. This phenomenological understanding of conflicts can let us, as my work has shown, better grasp the generative spaces and processes that constitute the political in environmental conflicts.

My work also invites political ecologists to re-sketch the scale of analysis of conflicts. The different dimensions (the psychological, the more-than-human, the social, the geographical and the political) and the different spheres (individual and collective, private and public) in which emotions ambivalently manifest in environmental conflicts calls for the consideration of several scales where environmental conflict takes place – where the individual, the familiar and the trans-generational also need to be included, together with the usual consideration of communitarian, collective and ecological–societal dynamics. My work also points to the expansion of political ecology’s methodological strategies to act–research in environmental conflicts, so that inter-subjectivity, reflexivity, spirituality and performance can be further considered as sites of power struggles over the environment.

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ANNEXS

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ANNEX 1. Actors Interviewed and Semi-structured Interviews in Chile

1. Social actors to be be interviewed

Group

A. Private Enterprises

B. State institutions and other institutions with rural and/or community interventions

C. Peasant (and) indigenous locals living near forest enterprises plots.

Goal

Gather information on discipline and governance mechanisms for the sake of fire control and prevention in areas where enterprises have forested plots.

Gather information about the role of state and municipal institutions in managing with private forestry activity and its associated environmental impacts to rural communities.

Identification of diverse reactions by locals in the area, to the governance/discipline mechanisms that private pine-euca monoculture imply. Access to their self-reflection on the way they participate/bind/react to the plantation economy.

Social Actors

• Forestry related enterprises (Arauco, Mininco, Volterra, CORMA and others). • Developers of fire prevention campaigns (sub-contracted by forestry enterprises) and “Guardabosques” (contracted by forestry enterprises) • Responsible for community relations and FSC at forestry enterprises

• CONAF (National Forestry Corporation) departments of Forest Fire control and prevention in Santiago, Concepción, and Arauco Province. • Local authorities (Mayors, Conadi, INDAP, SAG)

• Mapuche Commoners (comuneros) in direct resistance vs plantation/ enterprise due to land claims and/or environmental impacts• Locals (with and without Mapuche identity) in negotiation / collaboration with forestry companies• Activists pro native forest and participants of campaign against water scarcity

Other sources of information

• Action-research in AIFBN campaign “Agua que has de Beber”, on water scarcity due to tree plantations.

• Observation of Arauco (enterprise) workshops on forestry and fire prevention• Participation of Mapuche meetings in Hornopirén (Hualaihué, Los Lagos), Araucanía

Region and Arauco Province (Biobío Region).

2. Sample questions of the interviews

2. 1 Questions to GROUPS A and B (These are topics to be analysed also during my observation of educational campaigns of enterprises in local communities and rural schools)

• What has implied the expansion of the tree forestry enterprises in the area? How has this activity transformed local ways to relate to nature/forests?

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• Which values has the genesis and development of the forestry industry in Chile promoted? • How have they been promoted?• How do enterprises and government promote these values? (for example- environmental education campaigns, FSC, “Buena vecindad”). • What forest practices are encouraged and dis-encouraged to prevent fires? (access to plots, fire use)• What are the causes of fires, in this area? What are the means prioritized here, for the sake of fire prevention? • What economic expenses does fire prevention and control imply to the company? How much money does your company lose due to fires seasonally? • What are the benefits local communities receive from plantations? What are the impacts they receive, concretely due to forest fires?

2. 2 Concrete questions to GROUP C during interview may include

• What are the things you like of living here? What are the things you do not like? (if not said, question about the landscape- what can we see here, how do you feel in relation to what we see?)• What are the land work/economic activities that enable you to live here? What are the emotional attachments that make you stay here? (Sometimes I ask this by saying, “some of your neighbours sold their land and migrated to the city, did you not think of doing that too? Why (eco-emo)?”)• In which terms does plantations makes you better/worse off?• How would you describe your relationship to forest enterprises? Why? If collaborate: - How? - How do you feel about the fact that you are/ have become a forest “care-taker/ vigilant”? Has it changed your life? Do you like doing it? Why or why not? - If conflict: How? - Both: How do you express it, through what practices? How do you feel doing it, what are the motivations?• How is the relationship with CONAF? And other state institutions such as INDAP, SAG, etc?• How is the relationship with “guardabosques, prevencionistas, jefes de área”?• Do you think there is presence of control for the sake of fire prevention? What are the means enterprises use to protect their plantations, and what are the means you have to protect your plot/house? • Have you had to somehow change your livelihoods (like the use of fire, or making carbon) for the sake of fire protection? How has been the process of changing these? Who or what helped you?

Extra questions• Life history. How has been your and your community history related to the changes in terms of property and use of the land here? • How have values and practices related to land labour and forestry, changed in the last 40 years?

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ANNEX 2. Semi-structured Interviews and Focus Groups in Mexico

1. Sample of Interview Questions and Data Expected

INTERVIEW TO EDUPAZ

Interview Questions

When and for what reasons (contextual and others, past and present) does Edupaz develop GT workshops with indigenous-peasant communities? That is, what are the “emotions” of the local communities that motivate the organization of the workshops?

With what profile of indigenous communities does Edupaz work?- most common environmental conflicts / problems;- Political profile;- Level of activism / mobilization;- Ethnical and religious characteristics, internal organization of communities, etc / others.

What aspects of GT do you consider to be most useful to the communities with whom you work? (“awareness” - responsibility, awareness-action, others).What techniques or exercises do you usually use?How are do you adapt GT techniques to the local context?

In what ways are these aspects positively impacting communities, whose members participated of SAT-HTH workshops? Specific examples.

How are these aspects positively impacting communities, whose members participated of SAT-HTH workshops?. Specific examples.

What are the most difficult/challenging aspects of developing workshops with communities?

Data Expected

When and for what reasons (contextual and others, past and present) does Edupaz develop GT workshops with indigenous-peasant communities? That is, what are the “emotions” of the local communities that motivate the organization of the workshops? Motivations of Edupaz for developing GT workshops. “Emotional diagnosis” of local communities and its relationhip with the environmental context.

Description of the conditions of the communities that Edupaz works with.

Characteristics of GT suitable for working in the area.

Benefits in individual and collective terms of “awareness” thanks to GT workshops

Benefits in individual and collective terms of mobilisation thanks to GT workshops

Difficulties or problems for the development of GT workshops in the area.

1

2

3

4

5

6

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INTERVIEW TO THE COMMUNITIES

Interview Questions

Why do you decide to participate in the SAT-HTH workshops?

What are the environmental problems or conflicts that this community faces / has faced?

What are and how do the main actors in this conflict act?

Historically, how has this community and others reacted to this situation? What are the victories/progresses and the difficulties?

What emotions or experiences hindered or have hindered local, community activism? (Examples: fear, anger, grief, trauma; violence, subjugation, etc.)

How do you think the workshop benefited you as a member of the community? And in your role of community leader?

What elements / activities of SAT-HTH workshops were most useful to you?

Based on those benefits, what new actions could you organize regarding the environmental problem / conflict?What did you or the community gained (politically, e.g. new rights) with those “new actions”?Which aspects could to understand better (“awareness”) and take action (responsibility)?

What elements did you not like about the workshops, or do you think they lacked, and which could improve community activism in reference to the environmental conflicts described above?Why do you think the workshop has not been useful?

Data Expected

Expectations of communities for attending GT workshops

Description of the environmental conflict

Description of the environmental conflict. Data in order to search for further information.

Ways of local mobilisation

Emotional needs perceived by communities and their relationship to environmental problems.

Benefits in individual and collective terms of participation in GT workshops

Concrete exercises or dynamics that were considered useful (if possible, try to have diversity of them, i.e., related to beliefs, emotions and body)

Test if awareness/responsibility are the core GT concepts that are useful for communities. Either these, or others, I would like to have a list of concrete ways in which locals now better or “newly” face the conflict, thanks to GT workshops.

Difficulties or problems of the communities that GT workshops do not help to.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Annex 2


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2. Programme of the “Performative Focus Groups”

• Welcome / Prayer• “Performative focus group” presentation: objectives, program proposal. Consent, confidentiality and asking for permission to record• Presentation of the people who attend: name and sharing present feeling being here and sharing a concern you bring with regard to the community and what refers to local land and environmental issues (harvests, prices, access to land, water, mobilisation, conflict) setting a concrete example • Personal-individual reflexion on one’s own positioning in relation to that concern, what and how each one thinks, feels and does in relation to that concern. Each one draws/ writes something on a paper that symbolise concern • Body movement: guided movement with music with different rhythms (more and less loud and active) • Peer to peer reflection and discussion on concerns. Mutual listening. Differences and similarities• Plenary: Collective discussion. Individual and group proposals • Meditation and blessing• Evaluation• Collective lunch

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ANNEX 3. Emotions as Part of the Research Process

Reflections over my “Emotional Fieldwork Diary” (February 2014).

Emotional Political Ecology – Personal being political and vice-versapublished at https://entitleblog.org/2014/08/04/emotional-political-ecology-personal-being-

political-and-vice-versa/

I am now back in Santiago de Chile, after spending six intense weeks doing fieldwork mainly in the province of Arauco (southern Chile), researching a second case study for my PhD thesis on the political ecology of forest fires. I am an environmentalist and environmental scientist with training in psychology and therapy. That’s why in my academic work I also aim to deal with or to be aware of “the emotional” in environmental conflicts. This may sound strange and perhaps difficult, both in theory and in practice. However, these weeks of fieldwork have shown me that in order to talk about emotions in the context of environmental conflicts, one does not need to go faraway: doing research and doing fieldwork, being a white, single, “academic” woman in a rural-indigenous context provides lots of “political” information, but also emotional, and both of them talk about the geographies of power, inside and outside of us “subjects”.

When reading books or papers on environmental conflicts, I used to be surprised how authors are so clear on how the conflict develops, and how the different social actors are pushing for concrete socio-metabolic, political or economic interests. I know every paragraph of a book or paper implies hours of observation, action research, discussion and rewritings. I suppose that through this process we aim to rationalize what we write in order for others to understand us, and make it “replicable” or “universal”. But… What has happened during that research process? How do we relate our own emotions to the conflict, to diverse actors, and to the personal and political circumstances of diverse actors in a conflict? During these past intense weeks, apart from conducting more than 40 interviews with diverse social actors- private forestry enterprises managers, firefighters, indigenous authorities, peasants, etc.-, participating in indigenous ceremonies and observing management of local conflicts, etc., I have also been my own subject of study. This experiment had a clear result for me: doing fieldwork is an emotional labour/effort, i.e., being engaged in research and doing fieldwork on environmental conflicts imply dealing with emotional realities, from our own and from people we engage with. Until what point are we able to deal with emotions during fieldwork? How can we identify them? What do these emotions say about the conflict, about the way we relate to the research, to ourselves? The reasons why I decide to talk about this are diverse: 1. It is therapeutic for me, in the emotional sense, but also in helping me ‘process’ what I have learned. 2. It can be therapeutic for others, 3. If I pretend to talk about the emotions in environmental conflicts, i.e., about others’ emotions, how can I do it without caring about or addressing my own emotions? Only if I am open and able to feel, I can feel what the others are feeling.

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Being in the field, I remembered reading the paper of Laia Oliver Frauca, on women feeling fear during fieldwork, and how this fear is related to the social construction of women. In the social sciences, it was feminist methodology that made the role of the researcher’s emotion explicit to the research process. In my case, and taking advantage of the fact that I am writing for a blog, and not for an academic paper, I have tried to tackle this in a kind of phenomenological way, that is, just talking about my emotions, no theory underneath. However, I know that in order to identify them, I am influenced by my training as a Gestalt Therapist. I will not describe Gestalt, mainly because one of its core ideas is that there is not a clear text, paper or theory to be discussed. In Gestalt, our objects and tools come from our own and our relational experience. This may sound quite anti-academic, I cannot use a theoretical text in order to explain what emotions are or which kind of emotions exist. So, you just have to trust me. My first mentor of my training, Marcelo Antoni (who was previously trained as a psychoanalyst) used to talk about emotions as general psychologists do: based on 4 basic emotions: joy, sadness, fear, and anger. This is a description based on Basic Psychology, rather than “pure” gestaltic (in the case this exists). I will use this categorization not because I consider it the most suitable, but because it enables me to talk about this without having to share all my fieldwork notes (something that would expose me far too much).

Figure 1-Annex 3. Emotional map of my fieldwork in Chile. The size of the coloured area implies approximate frequency of different emotions during 6 weeks of fieldwork. Blue refers to fear, purple to sadness, yellow to joy, and red to anger.

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Reading back my notes on my different emotions during fieldwork I realize that being aware of these emotions was facilitating my self-reflexivity, on the personal, academic and political (with its flurry frontiers). When I was relating to indigenous Mapuche communities, I discovered emotions related to the questions I was asking to myself about my own identity, especially regarding my contact with them: I felt fear to feel isolated when I was first invited to attend to an indigenous meeting. This feeling was transformed into joy, when I had good communication experiences, when I met people wanting to share their culture with me, when I was invited to participate in a ceremony. In those cases, I realized I had anxiety of being the “other”. On the other side, being a single woman in a sexist scenario, and having a male friend who did not have a sexual purpose for me, was a source of joy too.

Other emotions speak of the fact of being in a conflictive scenario. I wasscared when I found myself, alone, in highly militarised areas, getting to know people who have publicly legitimized the use of violence against forestry enterprises. I was also feeling fear, when young activists were saying to me that my telephone will be now probably tapped. I also felt sad and empathized with the fear of people being scared by the violence due to the conflict. Realizing the magnitude of a historical conflict, where a PhD student has little to do and maybe even to understand, anger and sadness mixed and were transformed into impotence sometimes.

Being aware of the inequalities and environmental burdens that Industrial tree plantations imply locally for the maintenance of the global commodity chain, i.e., my own political ecologist perspective, was also enriched by emotions during fieldwork. I felt sad when locals told me how there were no other alternatives in the area rather than planting trees, and also joy sharing a meal with a peasant that aimed to maintain a garden between tree plantations. I felt anger through claustrophobia when travelling with a nonstop euca-pine landscape and in that sense I felt empathy to the anger of those who set fires as one way to express dis-conformism.

Given the vast quantity of people now engaged in the research of environmental conflicts, I am sure that if we create the opportunities to share emotions related to them, we give them space to be acknowledged. As Hubbard et al. (2010) say, the point is not to push out emotion from research but the opposite: emotions as inseparable experiences of our research, as driving forces of both engagement and paralysis in our research projects, in our compromise, in our activism. In contexts of environmental conflicts and social movements, where emotions usually fuel activism, enabling to talk about or to be aware of emotions can be not only therapeutic and helpful for the reproduction of our labour, but also promoting complementary ways of knowledge for the environmental justice we aim to embrace.

Annex 3


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ANNEX 4. Non-peer Reviewed Articles, Reports and Dissemination Activities related to Case Studies (mainly in Chile)

Non peer reviewed publications related with fieldwork research

• González-Hidalgo, M., 2016. Struggling for land and water: resistances to tree plantations in Southern Chile, Political Ecology for Civil Society Manual, http://www.politicalecology.eu/documents/events/57-political-ecology-for-civil-society/file

• González-Hidalgo, M., 2016. El modelo forestal desde la ecología politica. Leaflet- Web and printed for local dissemination (100 printed copies), http://www.mapuexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/El-Modelo-Forestal-y-la-Ecologia-Politica.pdf

• González-Hidalgo, M., 2015. Agua para quien: escasez hídrica y plantaciones forestales en la Provincia de Arauco, Agrupación de Ingenieros Forestales por el Bosque Nativo. Report- Web and printed for local dissemination (50 printed copies), http://www.aguaquehasdebeber.cl/publicacion/agua-para-quien-escasez-hidrica-y-plantaciones-forestales-en-la-provincia-de-arauco

• González- Hidalgo, M., and Schaeffer, C. Por qué la Ecología Política. Revista Rufián 23, Naturaleza y sociedad. Dinámicas de poder en un contexto neoliberal, http://rufianrevista.org/?portfolio=por-que-la-ecologia-politica

• González-Hidalgo, M., Fonk, M., and Toledo, G., 2014, Diversidad y biodiversidad como ejercicios de autonomía: alternativas locales ante el impacto de la industria forestal en Chile. Ecología Política 46, 73-77. Icaria Editorial Barcelona, Spain, http://www.ecologiapolitica.

info/?p=1200

Articles in blogs and local media in Spanish

• March 2017, ¿Qué se debe aprender de los incendios forestales en el centro-sur de Chile? http://www.elciudadano.cl/medio-ambiente/que-se-debe-aprender-de-los-incendios-forestales-en-el-centro-sur-de-chile/03/13/

• August 2015, Organización popular y campesina frente a la minería en Chiapas, https://entitleblog.org/2015/08/20/organizacion-popular-y-campesina-frente-a-la-mineria-en-chiapas/

• May 2015, “¿Agua para quién? Escasez hídrica y plantaciones forestales en la Provincia de Arauco” un informe develador y por eso indignante, Interview, https://resumen.cl/articulos/agua-para-quien-escasez-hidrica-y-plantaciones-forestales-en-la-provincia-de-arauco-un-informe-develador-y-por-eso-indignante

• July 2014, Historia de una escalera, https://verdeseo.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/historia-de-una-escalera/

• June 2014, El persistir en la resistencia ante el avance de las forestales en Arauco, https://verdeseo.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/el-persistir-en-la-resistencia-ante-el-avance-de-las-forestales-en-arauco/

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• May 2014, La expresión de lo político en los incendios forestales, Verdeseo, http://olca.cl/articulo/nota.php?id=104355

Articles in blogs in English

• July 2016, Struggling for land and water: resistances to tree plantations in Southern Chile, https://entitleblog.org/2016/07/19/struggling-for-land-and-water-resistances-to-tree-plantations-in-southern-chile/

• May 2015, Report: “Water for whom? Water scarcity and tree plantations in Arauco Province (Chile), https://entitleblog.org/2015/05/29/report-water-for-whom-water-scarcity-and-tree-plantations-in-arauco-province-chile/

• February 2015, The story of the stairs, http://entitleblog.org/2015/02/05/the-story-of-the-stairs-2/

• March 2014, Emotional Political Ecology – Personal being political and vice-versa https://entitleblog.org/2014/08/04/emotional-political-ecology-personal-being-political-and-vice-versa/

Public (non academic) talks

• January 2016, Radio Interview at Cerro a la Izquierda, Concepción (Bío-bio Region, Chile) Radio interviews, http://resumen.cl/2016/01/audio-cerroalaizquierda-el-agua-en-la-mira-de-las-forestales/

• January 2016, Interview by Mapuexpress, Temuco (Araucanía Region, Chile). Entrevista a investigadora internacional sobre impactos forestales en aguas del Wallmapu, http://www.mapuexpress.org/?p=7128

• January 2016, (Bío-bio Region, Chile), Conversatorio con Marien González: ¿Agua para quién? Escasez hídrica y plantaciones forestales en la Provincia de Arauco, https://resumen.cl/articulos/24889

• September 2014, Conversatorio (Discussion) on Political Ecology in Valdivia (Los Ríos Region, Chile), Agrupación de Ingenieros Forestales por el Bosque Nativo, http://bosquenativo.cl/

Annex 4